The Blood on My Hands
by Victar Archive
Summary: Kitana is the Shao Kahn's personal assassin, as loyal to him as to a God. Loyal, that is, until her mission to retrieve Liu Kang leads her to question her most basic assumptions about her master, and her twin sister Mileena...
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I am not Victar! I am merely crossposting his stories onto this site after obtaining his permission. With Victar's site being closed with the rest of AOL, I am posting his Mortal Kombat stories to FFnet to archive them. This story was written by him, and all credit goes to him.**

* * *

 _"All the time people say to me, 'Vlad, how do you do it? How come you're so good at killing people? What's your secret?' I tell them, 'There is no secret. It's like anything else. Some guys plaster walls, some guys make shoes, I kill people. You just gotta learn the trade and practice until you're good at it.'"_

-S. K. Z. Brust, " _Phoenix_ "

 _"Step One: Barter your soul to demons."_

-Kitana

 **THE BLOOD ON MY HANDS  
** **by Victar (vctr113062 aol . com)**

For as long as I can remember, Master Kahn has been my god.

It is so easy to serve him, officially as a warrior and unofficially as an assassin. All I have to do is obey, and in return, he takes care of my every need. I never have to worry about the future's pitfalls. The only purpose I need in my life is to protect and serve Master Kahn. If not for him, I would be lost, faced with innumerable uncertainties, and utterly alone. Alone, that is, except for my only blood relation. She is my twin sister, Mileena.

Mileena... how should I begin to describe her? I have never seen her unmasked. Never. Even when we were children, she wore that pink satin mask about her nose and lower face at all times, although I freely went barefaced.

Once, when we were young, I tried to pull Mileena's mask down as part of a madcap child's prank. We were playing in the Armory; that intensely warm chamber fascinated us both. (Master Kahn allowed us both the free run of his entire domain. We had guardians, of a sort, but they never spoke and never intervened unless we were in imminent danger... such as when I tried to hold the pretty, lime-green waters of the acidic castle moat in my cupped hand.) We were drawn to the slow-moving, incandescent rivulet of molten iron near the Armory's far wall. The liquefied metal flowed through a parallel set of carved stone gutters, one taller than we were, another at our feet. There was no ledge or rail to protect the unwary from falling in. Molten overflow in the upper trough slowly poured through evenly spaced perforations into the lower trough. Both troughs channeled their contents to other chambers reserved solely for weapon-making. One end of the Armory stored the weaponsmiths' latest crop of newly-forged armaments. At the other end of the Armory, broken weapons and armor accumulated until they were smelted into fuel, so that the cycle could begin anew.

Among the heaped piles of cold steel and languid pools of hot metal, Mileena and I were playing hide-and-seek. She was counting, with her arms crossed in front of her face, and she leaned forward on the far side of one of the Armory's square pillars. The viscous rivulet of oozing metal silently coursed some ten feet behind her. Our guards observed both of us carefully. Since Mileena had turned back upon me, I, mischievous little girl that I was, hatched a spontaneous scheme: what a funny practical joke it would be, to yank down her mask and finally see what she looked like underneath it! It would be a simple matter to silently approach her and whisk her satin veil away, before she could react. Or so I thought.

I was wrong. As soon as my fingers touched her cheek, she swung her elbow back, hitting my forehead. She followed up the unexpected blow with a reverse kick, the hard heel of her foot catching me solidly in my chest, all without turning around. I flew backward. My arms clumsily flailed in an instinctive impulse to soften my fall; they twisted underneath me when I landed upon the Armory's warm stone floor. A sharp ledge struck the back of my head, hard enough to scrape open my skin. The ugly, crackling sound of something smoldering assaulted my ears. I had landed just short of the lower creek of molten iron; the further extremity of my long black hair touched the superheated metal, and its red-hot warmth had set my tresses alight. Had Mileena been strong enough to kick me with just a little more force, I might have fallen in completely. I think I screamed, and started to cry.

Our guards rushed forward. Before they could reach me, Mileena turned around, simultaneously readjusting the corner of her mask, and jumped. She cleared the distance between us effortlessly - I would have gaped in awe of her grace if I weren't so terrified - and landed heavily upon my upper body. The wind rushed out of my lungs, one of my ribs cracked, and I almost, but not quite, fainted from the pain. My eyes were wide with bewilderment. Hers seethed with undiluted hatred and malice. Her left hand grabbed my hair and wrenched my head back, within inches of the gutter of molten metal. By now my guards were next to me and attempting to restrain her, but they could not stop her right hand from delivering a crushing blow to my throat.

I died.

I clearly remember dying.

When I awakened, Mileena was by my bedside. She said that she was sorry I had gotten hurt, but it had been my own fault for provoking her. Then she asked me why had I done this to myself, hadn't I known better, and had I learned my lesson for the future? Her hands spasmodically clenched and unclenched while she waited for my answer. When I managed a slight nod, she turned and left without farewell. Once she was gone, I noticed that I had been holding my breath, and slowly let it out, waiting for the tension in my muscles to recede.

She had been faster than me. She has always been faster than me. I grew up knowing this; our games of tag were a constant reminder. I would invariably be "it," and she would taunt me, always staying out of my reach, while I strained to keep up with her. She sprinted without exertion, gliding like some ethereal ghost, her feet barely seeming to brush against the ground. I pursued, desperately laboring for additional velocity, my unwieldy feet pounding with each frantic step. But the full extent of her swiftness never truly sank in until that one day, the first time she ever turned on me without restraint. Every move she'd made had been a blur, faster than I could react, faster than our guards could react, perhaps faster than anyone could have reacted. Since then I have undertaken countless hours of daily training, tests of strength and stamina, acrobatics, and sprinting, so that I myself am one of the most agile warriors in the Outworld. Despite all my efforts to narrow the gap, she remains faster than me.

Perhaps that is why I have never tried to remove her mask again, or even ask her about it. Three years after that fatal incident, I took to wearing a mask of my own at Master Kahn's request. Since then, I have never questioned why Mileena wears hers; I've assumed that the Master expects it of her, just as he expects it of me.

Comparative dexterity aside, there is only one other physical distinction between Mileena and me: our voices. Her voice rasps and grates upon every syllable. She cannot speak two words without sounding cruelly sarcastic. In contrast, my natural voice is fairly mellifluous. I can even sing, a little. I flatter myself to think that I am tolerably good at it. Sometimes, during the rare moments when I am not busy carrying out my obligations to Master Kahn, I retreat to my private quarters and reread the two books I have upon music. I've been training myself to play a small, wooden flute, which took me two months to painstakingly carve. The Master takes a dim view of such "frivolous" undertakings in general, but he has not explicitly forbidden me to practice my hobby... not that I have ever brought the topic up for discussion.

I've never told anyone, including my sister, about my private studies in music. Mileena has her secrets, and I have mine.

* * *

People should know better.

One would think that by now, Master Kahn's subjects would have learned not to oppose him. There is not a single successful tale of anyone who ever rebelled against him in the smallest way. But there are always fools who are lost in their own self-importance, jokers who think "it can't happen to me," and suicidal madmen. These are the ones who keep me busy. My duty is to search out troublemakers and deal with them - permanently.

I remember them all. Sometimes, when I am wandering the misty domain between wakefulness and sleep, I can see their faces frozen in death. When I am fully asleep, I sometimes hear their voices cry screams, pleas, insults, or incoherent cries of rage. The effect is so chilling that I awaken in a cold sweat. I don't know why. They don't pose any threat to me. They are dead, and will stay dead forever; the only beings in the Outworld with the power to undo death are Master Kahn and his recently returned minion, Shang Tsung, the shape-shifting sorcerer.

The Master had spent over five hundred years preparing for the day when Shang Tsung would pave the road to further conquests and glory. Shang Tsung's duty was to unbalance the Cosmic Furies, and permanently breach the barriers between the Outworld and the Mother Realm. He planned to open the gateway at the climax of his grandiose martial arts Tournament, but something went disastrously wrong. A Shaolin monk named Liu Kang won the Tournament, sowing the seeds of chaos amidst the sorcerer's designs. The carefully nurtured vortex between two worlds collapsed in on itself. Shang Tsung died. Shang Tsung's Outworld liaison, the four-armed, half-human half-dragon prince Goro, disappeared without a trace. If Master Kahn had any part of Goro's body, then he could expend his power to revive Goro, just as he brought Shang Tsung back from the dead, just as he brought me back when Mileena killed me. Master Kahn's single most powerful servant, Adjutant General Kintaro, searched the rubble of Shang Tsung's former palace for three days and three nights without finding Goro. Goro is gone forever only because his body _cannot_ be found... an irony appreciable to anyone familiar with the protocols of death and murder.

Such as myself.

I do not understand why Master Kahn has renewed Shang Tsung's youth and replenished his power. The Master claims that Shang Tsung stays loyal to him out of "respect." I have maintained an uneasy, covert vigilance of the sorcerer regardless. Master Kahn may be generous enough to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I am not so charitable. Shang Tsung is too capricious, too prone to excess, and too self-obsessed with his quest for "immortality." He is not as loyal to Master Kahn as I am.

Then again, I suppose few beings are as loyal to Master Kahn as I am.

He is my god, after all.

* * *

For several weeks now, Master Kahn has been keeping two warriors from the Mother Realm prisoner. They are chained to concrete pedestals in his Arena, near where the Wasteland borders his city of Shokan. The Master has decreed that they shall remain there, on display like taxidermic trophies, until they swear allegiance to him. It strikes me that he is going to a disproportionally large amount of trouble over two mere mortals, but it is not my place to question his will. I have, mostly out of boredom and curiosity, taken it upon myself to personally inspect the captives. There was quite literally nothing better for me to do. Master Kahn had not sent me on any missions in weeks, presumably because there hadn't been any recent events serious enough to warrant my intervention.

I was not the only one who was bored. Mileena was there, talking to the male prisoner. She was too far away for me to make out her words, but when she brought one of her sai up against the great vein of his throat, her meaning became all too clear.

"Mileena! What are you doing!" I called, quickening my pace. She turned her head toward me, without letting up on the pressure of the sai.

Mileena's eyes are brown, like mine, yet I can't help thinking that they should be blue - the cold blue of deadened human skin overexposed to the frosty bite of the elements. For Mileena is a practitioner of Ice Sorcery. Where she learned it, I don't know... Ice Sorcery is rarely used or taught in Shokan because of its dangerous and unpredictable side effects. Some say that the Sorcery of Ice chills both outward and inward, literally and figuratively. It is reputed to replace one's capability for compassion with glacial aloofness, and turn one's blood as frigid as the current of a winter river. "Cold, her look; cold, her touch; and cold, some say, her heart," goes the archaic adage.

I do not know whether the warnings are true. Mileena can be cool and unfeeling sometimes, but that was part of her nature long before she undertook her sorcerous studies. She has become moderately adept at using Ice Sorcery offensively through her chosen weapon, the paired sai. The desire of her will converts her silver sai into the azure essence of pure frigidity, which she can hurl at a distant foe; then, her weapons mysticly re-form on her person.

Most times, I doubt that the casting of a few spells could have any effects upon her personality or physiology. And then there are times when she looks at me as if to freeze me solid where I stand, and I shiver as if flinching from an arctic wind.

"Oh, Kitana," she drawled, "you _never_ let me have any fun."

"Master Shao Kahn's orders are to leave the prisoners be." I have never understood her fascination with torture any more than her fascination with ice. The infliction of physical or mental torment is a notoriously unreliable means of extracting information; the one being tormented won't necessarily say the truth, but rather whatever he thinks his captors want to hear. And outside of being used to gather information, torture is a pointless waste of valuable time and resources. Our duty is to swiftly eliminate the Master's enemies, not to wallow in gratuitously excessive displays of sadism. I have told Mileena that more than once. It is not that she refuses to listen; rather, it is as if I am speaking to her in a cryptic foreign language, and she cannot comprehend my words.

Instead of continuing her protests, as I expected her to, Mileena shocked me by abruptly asking, "And since when do you care anything for the Master's orders?"

What in all the Astral Planes...!?

"I don't know what you are talking about, sister." Was this another of her mean-spirited jests? If so, then it was not at all funny!

Mileena removed the dagger from the prisoner's throat, and twirled her paired sai in her either hand. "Don't you... _sister_?" I remained rooted where I stood, speechless with disbelief and motionless from astonishment. Master Shao Kahn is my god! My loyalty to him is and has always been absolute! How dare she insinuate - just what _was_ she insinuating?

My sister had crossed the distance to the female prisoner, and was treating her in much the same way as she'd treated the male. The prisoner did not react in any way save to vacantly stare at her. "Mileena!" I snapped once more. She used her sorceries to warp and disappear from view before I could question her further.

The male prisoner interrupted my stunned silence with an expletive, and made a pass at me. I suggested that he accept the offer to become part of the Master's army, and resisted the desire to behead him. He refused, but I knew that it would be only a matter of time before he came to see things our way. He had the feel of a killer. Not just any common street thug or deranged madman, but a practiced, professional killer, who knows how to knife one enemy and invite all the others to a feast.

I could feel the gaze of the female prisoner on me as I departed. Turning around to look at her, I saw - blankness. Nothing. No spark. No substance. Her eyes were stagnant pools of blue-tinged grey, more cold in their own way than my sister's worst, most hate-filled stare could ever be. At least I know beyond doubt that Mileena is alive.

That day had been jarring, but it was nothing compared to the days that followed. At one point, I happened to walk past the Arena. I briefly deliberated going in, then decided against it. I'd give the prisoners a little more time to reflect upon their hopeless state before reiterating the Master's offer. I was about to leave when I glimpsed Mileena and Major General Baraka in the shadow of the door jamb. They were engaged in hushed conversation.

Major General Baraka is one of the few beings who genuinely frightens me. He is not human; he belongs to a malformed generation of one-time humans whose bodies and genes were scarred by fallout from the Great War. "Mutants," we call them, yet that simple word cannot begin to describe their hideous appearance. Their skin is colored a jaundiced yellow-brown; their bodies are lean and wiry. The males almost never have hair. Their strength is, on the average, one and a half times greater than a corresponding human's. Cut them open and they may bleed red, brown, or brackish black blood, depending upon the individual. Their flesh is colder and stiffer than ours, and adapts to foreign objects more easily; some of them undergo surgery without anesthesia to graft metal weapons onto their limbs. Baraka in particular has retractile swordblades embedded in the backs of his forearms. By far the most psychologically chilling aspect of the Outworld's mutants is their faces - especially their sunken, solid red eyes, and their anomalously wide maws of metal-coated teeth. Their faces are virtually frozen in a nauseating rictus grin, with their lips peeled abnormally far back, further than any living human could manage.

Despite the impression I may give, it is not Baraka's image that instills quiet terror within me. Appearances can be extremely deceiving, as any experienced spy will tell you. No, what bothers me is that I know Baraka; he is prone to unreasoning fits of murderous rage, due to his unpredictable temper. I suspect he has no true loyalty to anyone, not even Master Kahn. Baraka is a nigh-unstoppable killing machine with no heart, no soul, and no remorse. I should know; I've ordered him to kill and watched him relish every second of it.

Setting aside my unease, I approached the strange couple, intending to question Mileena about the accusations she'd made the previous morn. Before I could say a word, though, she took her eyes off Baraka, glared at me, and hissed, "Leave, 'sister.' This doesn't concern you!" Baraka also stared at me; I could only guess what thoughts might lurk behind those empty red eyes.

I had nothing to gain by prolonging the implicit conflict, so I muttered, "I need to talk with you later," and left. At the time, I thought nothing more of the encounter. It wasn't until much later that I began to ask myself just what business Mileena and Baraka might have that "didn't concern me."

I spent the evening practicing my singing within the soundproof walls of my private quarters. The next morning, I heard so many wild tales that at first I was sure they must be groundless rumors; but all my sources confirmed everything. The male prisoner had slipped out of his chains and attempted to flee. Baraka had stopped him, with help from the female prisoner. Both prisoners had died in the process, and the Master had chosen to resurrect them.

Baraka?

The female prisoner?

Why didn't Master Kahn ask me to hunt the escapee down? Must I chain myself to a concrete pedestal before he considers me worthy?

* * *

"YOU MUST LET ME KILL HIM!"

The furious scream cut into my ears so harshly I thought they might bleed. I choked back a snarl and fixed my eyes on the screamer. It was that miserable excuse for a petty magician, Shang Tsung. For the thousandth time, I wondered why the Master had bothered to resurrect him. Was there no one else in the entire Outworld who could create a permanent gate to the Mother Realm? And why, for that matter, did the Master agree to back Shang Tsung's wild fantasies of a second Tournament? Even now, they scheme to "lure" their enemies into their "trap," the better to "destroy them." Why should they need a Tournament to do that? No matter who or what threatens the Master, Mileena and I could make them vanish for good. We are not called "the Master's Right Hand" and "the Master's Left Hand" for nothing. But he has not requested our services. I don't understand. We have served the Master faithfully! Neither of us has ever failed! Shang Tsung _has_ failed, and yet the Master entrusts him with the responsibility of delivering their "mutual enemies" to his "Tournament"...!

One advantage to wearing a mask is that my concealed face cannot give away my inner feelings. My eyes won't betray me, unless I am not careful to rigorously control the burning drives to narrow my eyelids into slits, or knit my brows into angry furrows. And so, as I heard Shang Tsung's sniveling yelps encroach upon the divine sanctity of the Master's throne room, I erased all traces of righteous outrage from my demeanor. Not that Shang Tsung could see me - I hid in my ceiling niche close to the Master's throne - but it is a good habit to keep in practice.

"Damn you, Shao Kahn!" the sorcerer ranted. "Enough of your games! Do as you wish with the rest, but LET ME KILL LIU KANG!" I held one of my bladed fans in each hand. A word, a single gesture from the Master, and I could have dropped from above, using their lethal edge to shear off that whining dog's head before I touched the ground. It would not have been the first time... yet Master Kahn neither spoke the word nor made the gesture. He did not want me to interfere.

"-you've GOT to let me KILL him, he's a danger to us all! I'll bring you other mortal warriors for your Tournament! I'll bring you a whole ARMY of mortal warriors! But LIU KANG HAS TO DIE! YOU MUST-"

Master Kahn stepped down from his ebony, skull-decorated throne, swinging his massive right arm in a gesture that might have seemed lazy if not for its staggering velocity. His open hand squarely cuffed Shang Tsung's face. Shang Tsung slammed against the wall behind him with a sickening sound, then slumped to the floor. The force of his crash had crumpled the solid gold decorations upon the wall's white marble surface. A slow-moving stain of fresh blood worked its way downward from where the back of his skull had connected.

"...is this a bad time?" he croaked.

No man could have survived that blow, not if he were caught unawares as Shang Tsung had been. Yet the shape-shifting sorcerer not only lived; he was still conscious, albeit dazed. I have no explanation for this, other than a speculation that his external, humanlike appearance is just another disguise.

 **"I GIVE YOU _ONE_ WARNING,"** boomed the Master. He did not have to elaborate; Shang Tsung knew precisely what would happen to him if he did not heed the notice, and heed it well. **"KNEEL, SLAVE, AND REPORT. HAVE YOU BROUGHT ME THE WARRIORS THAT I SENT YOU TO RETRIEVE?"**

Oh, the abhorrence in Shang Tsung's eyes! Couldn't the Master see it? I redoubled my vigilance.

Shang Tsung genuflected and quickly explained that he'd tried to transport the warrior Liu Kang to the Master's palace. Soon after he brought Liu Kang through the unstable, prototype Portal near the fringe of the Master's domain, the monk turned upon him. Shang Tsung had fought back, severely hampered by the Master's orders not to kill or do severe injury to Liu Kang. The sorcerer had fled, leaving Liu Kang behind to wander the Outworld.

 **"AND DO YOU FEAR THIS MONK SO MUCH THAT YOU REFUSE TO FACE HIM A THIRD TIME?"** laughed the Master. **"CAN'T YOU PERFORM THE SIMPLE TASK OF BRINGING ME _ONE_ LONE MORTAL, ALIVE AND UNHURT?"**

Shang Tsung's face flushed deep red. "If it were any other, yes I could. But Liu Kang...!" He licked his lips and shook his head slightly. "That is not within my power."

 **"EVEN TAKING INTO ACCOUNT ALL THE SORCEROUS ENERGIES I HAVE INVESTED IN YOU?"**

The sorcerer flinched and averted his eyes from the Master's piercing gaze. "Master, you don't understand! I haven't told you what Liu Kang is capable of; after we both entered your realm, he-"

The rumbling of Master Kahn's mirth sounded again, so pervading that the stone arch I crouched upon vibrated in synchronization. **"AND IF ONE OF MY SERVANTS WITH MUCH LESS POWER THAN YOU WERE TO SUCCEED IN THIS TASK - THEN, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY?"**

At first, Shang Tsung looked ready to complete his interrupted sentence, but all he said was, "Master, I pity the servant who tries." I wondered what debased thoughts were crawling through his corrupt mind. Certainly not pity. Shang Tsung never wasted pity on anyone save himself.

 **"SO YOU CLAIM,"** sneered the Master, folding his arms. I could just barely see his lips curl upward beneath his polished steel mask.

Insight flared.

At last, I knew the answer to a riddle that had plagued me for weeks. I intuitively grasped why Master Kahn deigned to permit Shang Tsung's continued existence:

Entertainment.

Master Shao Kahn is very old. I've heard appraisals of his age range from one thousand to ten thousand years. Those estimations are off by a factor of twenty. He is, quite literally, the oldest living being in the Outworld. Is it truly surprising how easily even the extravagant pleasures of conquest, rule, and power bore him? He has already seen and done so many things... Shang Tsung was a weak and traitorous lackey, yet his pathetic antics amused the Master. That Shang Tsung was no professional jester, but rather a deadly serious contender in his own right, only sharpened the razor keenness of the irony.

The master chuckled; his pet clown fumed in silence. Then, without raising his eyes to my ceiling niche, Master Kahn thundered, **"KITANA, I CHARGE YOU TO BRING ME THE WARRIOR LIU KANG, ALIVE AND UNHURT. YOU WILL SET OUT, ON WYVERNBACK, IN NO LESS THAN ONE HOUR FROM THIS TIME."**

I damn near dropped both my fans.

* * *

I hate those wyverns.

They are messy, ill-tempered, dangerous beasts. They also stink and carry disease, due to their habit of feeding on carrion. Despite all the legends, wyverns do not truly make optimum cavalry mounts. They can barely stay aloft with the additional weight of a human-sized rider - perhaps two riders if both aren't too heavy - so that wearing armor or using any save the lightest weapons is out of the question. It is far too easy for a ground-based enemy to bring a wyvern down with any sort of projectile, even a mere arrow shot from a longbow. The animals' hides are thick enough so that few things short of a mounted lance can inflict truly grievous damage on them, but that is not the chief danger. It takes little to upset a wyvern's tenuous aerial balance, because they have no rudder. Just as ships have a rudder to guide their course through water, so do flying birds have tail feathers which they can spread into a fan shape, to help them chart their path through the air. Wyverns do not have feathers; their skin is dry and leathery, and their tails are like long whips. The appendage hangs back and down when they are aloft, its weight stabilizing the creature a little bit, but not very much. It is a minor miracle that wyverns can stay aloft at all, that stray gusts of wind do not undermine their equilibrium and send them spiraling to earth. And if something startles the dumb beasts, such as, say, the glancing blows of a few arrows...

I've learned the basics of wyvern-riding as part of my training regimen. I can barely stand it. Myths and legends glamorize riding a wyvern as some joyfully exhilarating undertaking. Ha! It is no grand adventure; it's literally a nauseating experience - one look down, and you're likely to vomit. The beast itself infrequently voids its bladder or bowels while a-wing, another reason why one never wants to be underneath a wyvern in flight. Flying wyvernback is also inherently hazardous. Even given the most masterful riding skills and the most docile mount, falling off of the wyvern is _always_ a risk. The creatures are prone to sudden moments of panic while in flight, and are notoriously poor at landing.

Fortunately, wyverns breed like rats, and the Master has gathered a voluminous army, so that he can easily replace the soldiers and wyverns lost in all-too-common accidents. He also has the option of resurrecting his more useful minions, should he deem them worth the expenditure of energy. I am the Master's Left Hand. If I were to fall to my death, he would revivify me, provided that my body could be found and brought to him. The knowledge does little to allay my inner queasiness when I am about to fly wyvernback, as I was within an hour of receiving Master Kahn's command.

"Wait, Kitana. May I have a word with you before you depart?" The question was extremely cordial. That immediately set me on edge, for I knew the one who asked it, and he is by nature one of the most disrespectful bastards in the Astral Planes. Furthermore, his attitude toward me in particular has always been just short of openly hostile. I don't know why; I've never done anything to him. Even so, I found it hard to believe that he'd abruptly change his discourteous ways, solely out of the nonexistent goodness of his black heart.

"What do you want, Shang Tsung?" I replied wearily, going over my wyvern's riding gear once more.

"Just a moment of your time, I assure you."

"Make it quick."

"Very well. We both know that you excel at homicide."

"I am not an assassin." I have repeated that lie so many times, to so many different beings, that it rolls off my lips with ease. Shang Tsung did not contest the statement. He knew that I was lying, and I knew that I was lying, so what point would there have been in pressing the matter?

"As you say. But when you do track down Liu Kang... well, accidents can happen."

I should have suspected as much. "Master Kahn's orders are to bring the monk back _alive_ and _unhurt_."

"Of course they are. I've merely come to warn you that carrying them out to the letter would be an extremely strenuous challenge. I can help you; I can inform you of Liu Kang's abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and guide you to his most likely current whereabouts."

"All right, tell me."

"First, promise that you'll expunge this dire threat to the Kahn."

"No."

The sorcerer's facade of false chivalry crumbled away posthaste. I finished my inspection and swung myself into the wyvern's saddle, literally looking down upon his bristling visage. "He'll kill you, you little bitch! You don't know what you're getting into. Without my help, you won't stand a chance!"

"I need no help from a coward like you."

Shang Tsung raised his clenched fist and bared his teeth. He always was easy to bait. I adjusted the clasp of my sable cloak, a seemingly innocuous gesture that allowed my arms to brush against and confirm the proper positioning of my concealed weapons: fans, caltrops, garrotes, four darts tipped with sleeping sap, and three darts tipped with deadly nightshade.

"Liu Kang is the most dangerous enemy you'll ever live to face," hissed the sorcerer, punctuating each word with his scorn. "I take no shame in retreating from him."

"Don't you? What a pity." I shook the wvyern's reins and dug my heels into its side. It squawked and ambled toward the cave's front opening, flexing its wings. As my mount hopped out of its roost and pulled into a glide, coasting upon the eddies of the wind, Shang Tsung hollered several things that I will not repeat.

The wyvern and I soared above the corpse-strewn battlefield which encircles the Master's city of Shokan. Master Kahn's servants used to tell me epics about the Master's glorious conquests and the base, spineless vermin who attempted to usurp his power. I'd listen especially raptly to their stories of the Great War. Some thirty years ago, there was a group of dark warriors who, led by a mated pair of humans, tried to force the Master off his rightful throne within his castle. The resulting siege wreaked havoc on both sides of the castle's gates. By the time of the Master's divine triumph, the rebels had butchered two-thirds of Shokan's native population and scattered the remaining third. So much blood soaked the battlefield that the gods descended to curse the land, turning the soil to gravel and the waters to lethally caustic acid. Since then, the battlefield and all the terrain for miles around Shokan have been called the Wasteland, an arid place in which only the most devolved and predatory creatures can survive. Having caused their fair share of destruction, the gods then departed the Outworld entirely. They have never manifested here since; or at least, not in any form powerful enough to mention.

Since the land surrounding the Master's castle is agriculturally barren, and only a few tribes of mutants are mad enough to live there, Master Kahn uses the battlefield's noxious plains to dispose of traitors and criminals. His standard method of capital punishment is to impale the guilty on pointed wooden poles - usually through the heart, but his most despised enemies may face the slower, more painful death of impalement through the liver or intestines. Then one end of the pole is firmly planted in the ground, propping up the corpse. It is impossible to approach the Master's castle without passing by hundreds of such grisly displays. Thus does Master Kahn warn his vassals of the penalty for betrayal.

I guided the wyvern in the direction of the flickering, unstable rift between worlds that was Shang Tsung's nascent Portal. Once I reached it, I would search the nearby area until I could find either Liu Kang or his spoor. Then I'd track him down, subdue him, and bring him back. Master Shao Kahn had given me an artifact from the Golden Age to help me restrain the monk. It was an enchanted cord, unbreakably strong, and invulnerable to damage from anything save hellfire. The cord had been woven from fishes' breath, bird spittle, a woman's beard, the miaowing of a cat, the sinews of a bear, and mountain roots - if you choose to believe the legends, that is. I cared little about the historical origin of the gossamer silver cord; all I needed to know was that it worked. It did. I'd tested it by drawing the stropped edge of my fan across it several times; it showed no trace of wear or fraying.

My mount swiftly carried me past the corpse-strewn plains of the battlefield and above the treetops of the Living Forest. The evening sky had already changed color from dull grey to vivid orange when I'd set out; now, the gradual onset of night was slowly quenching the atmosphere's illusionary fire. By the time I reached the Portal, the only light in the sky came from the Outworld's softly glowing moon. Unlike the Mother Realm, Shokan has no stars. Since I could not search effectively in the darkness, I guided my wyvern down, intending to land near the Portal and make camp for the night. Had I been anyplace else in the Wasteland, I might have been in danger from its nomadic mutant populace, but the savages fear sorcery. They will not come within miles of the mystic gate.

Just beyond the edge of a sheer cliff face, the Portal lay fixed in midair. The empty chasm surrounding the Portal is not truly a bottomless abyss; solid ground does lie a few miles below, although low-flying clouds frequently obscure it. The land has not always borne this jagged geographical scar. Prior to the Great War, it consisted of gentle, verdant plains. That was before the curse of the gods changed everything.

I steered my wyvern about the Portal's shifting focus, coasting above the matrix of stone squares suspended in midair near it. The stone squares formed the closest thing to a bridge between the Portal and the solid ground a couple dozen yards away. Levitating above some of the squares were the Master's shadow priests, wraithlike beings garbed in hooded purple robes. I ignored them, for they never interfere in mortal affairs, and rarely speak to anyone save the Master himself.

A single streak of lightning cracked across the sky, terrifying my mount and nearly costing me my neck. Thunder hammered upon my ears. Ominous rainclouds hid the moon, plunging everything into complete darkness. The wyvern squealed and bucked, as a sudden onslaught of driving rain pelted my eyes and made the beast's skin slick. A furious gale rose out of nowhere; its violent turbulence bent the beast's wings back. The wyvern's scream joined the howling of the gale. I felt myself slipping off, and desperately clutched at the reins. The wyvern jerked its head upward, clumsily flapped in a hovering pattern for one heartrending second, and miraculously skidded to a rough landing on the cliff.

I whispered a prayer of thanks to the Master.

More lightning tore through the troposphere, as though my heartfelt benediction had angered some cosmic being... and perhaps it had. As soon as the brilliance faded, I saw the luminous avatar of a god. He presented himself in the form of a mortal man, garbed in white with a blue surcoat upon his torso. Two patches ornamented the sleeves of his raiment. Each was colored the lustrous yellow of a lightning bolt, and bore streamlined black brush strokes depicting the symbol of the storm. Underneath the god's wide, cone-shaped hat, his eyes blazed with scintillating electricity. He floated in the swirling, ozone-tinged winds just off the edge of the cliff. The rainstorm that soaked me to the bone bent and parted about him, so that not one drop landed upon his person.

I dismounted from the wyvern, and quickly slipped a black hood over its head before it could panic again. The god addressed me while I did so, even though I had turned my back upon him; perhaps he wasn't used to being ignored. His "voice" could only be described as medley of contradictions: roaring, yet silent; proud, yet sadly humble; ancient, yet imbued with the vigor of eternal youth. The message was not so much composed of discrete words as it was of impressions, emotions, sensations. His meaning rang clear and true, more easily grasped than anything approximated by such clumsy mortal tools as speech or language. It was the voice of a god. Beyond that, I cannot describe it.

 _~Raiden would talk with you, mortal.~_

I turned around, meeting his unearthly stare with my own.

"Raiden can choke on his own lies!" I shouted above the thunder, making no attempt to hide my intense hatred. I fully expected him to blast me in a fit of divine wrath, but strangely, he showed no response to my insult at all. His lack of a reaction made me even angrier. "You, you and all the other gods like you, _you_ despoiled this land! You abandoned this world! You are Master Kahn's enemy! You nearly _killed_ me with your grandstanding theatrical entrance! And you want to 'TALK'? CALL OFF YOUR DAMNED THUNDERSTORM BEFORE YOU SAY ANOTHER WORD!"

The downpour tapered off as quickly as it had come. The rainclouds that had brought it drifted away, revealing the tranquil light of the moon.

 _~Is that better?~_ asked the god.

I stared back, not believing he had done it.

 _~An evil time comes upon us, Kitana,~_ he continued, his face as unreadable as ever. _~The war between the darkness and the light has begun. The fates of worlds hang in the balance. You are needed, Kitana. You have sided with Shao Kahn, with the darkness, but I come to give you one last chance to ally yourself with the light.~_

I glared at him, in silence broken only by a puzzled whimper from the wyvern.

"Who are you to dare..." It was not a question. "Who are you to lecture me about darkness and light? I know all about you, god of thunder. Who are you to dare?

"Before the Great War, you and your brother, Fuijen the wind god, wrestled for seven days out of each year. Your titanic struggles generated hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods that wreaked havoc on the peaceful inhabitants of the Astral Planes!

"During the Great War, you sent forty days and forty nights of continuous rainstorms upon the troops who battled within the Valley of Plenty. You turned the most fertile savannah in the Outworld into the fetid Quagmire of Sinking Death, haunted by the lost ghosts of ten thousand warriors!

"At the close of the Great War, you agreed with the rest of the gods to desert the land you had battered into near-lifelessness. You are a member of the godly congregation who proposed the Divine Sanctions, hoping that if you ignored us, we would fade into extinction!

"After the Great War, you could no longer blight the Outworld with your senseless brawls. So you entered Shang Tsung's Tournament, and strived to take control of the competition. You planned to use the Tournament as a pretext to challenge other gods with your endless wargames, to turn the Mother Realm into another ravaged celestial playfield! You have always been blind to the sufferings of your victims, and deaf to their tearful pleas! How many have you murdered, god of thunder? How many innocent men and women have been broken, drowned, electrocuted, or starved by the chaos you embrace? How many lost their homes to your callous indifference? How many have sickened and perished from the plagues left in the wake of your floods? You pretend to be a champion of the light, but your actions belie your true nature. Who are you, _who are you_ , WHO ARE YOU to accuse me of siding with darkness!"

The wyvern continued to whine, faintly, while I awaited his answer.

~Even gods can change,~ he said at last, softly. _~Not that it matters. My past has no bearing upon what you and your Master have done, nor what you plan to do. You_ are _an agent of his darkness, Kitana, whether you realize it or not.~_

"Believe what you like about me, god-"

 _~No,~_ he interrupted, a shade more forcefully, _~it is_ you _who believes, who clings desperately to the myths Shao Kahn has told you. You have persuaded yourself to accept all his little lies, until their cumulative distortion assumes the shape of one great Lie, a Lie that engulfs your life and soul. You, little assassin, are just as blind, deaf, and callous as I once was.~_

"THAT IS NOT TRUE!" I screeched, the last ebb of my self-restraint giving way. In less time than it takes to draw breath, I palmed one of my nightshade-tipped darts and hurled it at the false god's lying throat. Just before its point touched his skin, his outline diffused into so much white light, vanishing into nothingness. Then the entire world dissolved, turning similarly white, and I felt myself dissolve with it. I tried to scream my defiance, but I had no lungs, no throat, and no tongue with which to speak.

 _~No, Kitana,~_ came the stern reprimand of the god from everywhere and nowhere, _~this audience is not yet finished. I have patiently listened to you denounce my crimes. Now, it is my turn.~_ I felt my body restored by degrees, although it remained numb and unresponsive, as if someone or something else were controlling its movements. My eyes were closed. When they opened, entirely of their own accord, I was in the Master's Arena.

The Arena was different from when I had last seen it. The most obvious disparity was the absence of the prisoners from the Mother Realm, but that was not all. The stone blocks were not quite as chipped and weathered, and the metal chains on the empty concrete pedestals shined so brightly that I had to blink and look away from their glint.

Master Kahn sat in the Arena's throne, holding the spear that serves the double function of weapon and scepter of office. Throngs of spectators crowded row upon row of the surrounding bleachers. Across from me was small man with glassy, fishlike eyes. His gaze nervously darted from point to point.

( _This is the past!_ ) I tried to say, but couldn't. Instead, my body kneeled before the Master.

 **"THIS IS THE FINAL TEST OF YOUR WORTHINESS TO SERVE ME,"** he boomed. **"TO PASS, YOU MUST SLAY THE CRIMINAL OPPOSITE YOU. LOSE, AND HE WILL KILL YOU. WIN, AND YOU WILL EARN THE RANK OF A WARRIOR."**

( _~Yes, this is the past.~_ ) The words of the thunder god reverberated within my head. ( _~These are your memories, Kitana - the memories of your most evil deeds.~_ )

 **"FIGHT!"** commanded the Master.

My body moved irresistibly into the combat, approaching my enemy just as I remembered I had. I could not change my actions; I was only an observer in a scene that played out as it had once before, in the course of my life. If I had been more than an observer, I would not have foolishly rushed in on the smaller man, who grasped hold of my silken garb and rolled back, tossing me over his head. If I had been more than an observer, I would have turned in midair to land gracefully on my feet, not clumsily on my side. And I would not have wasted precious time struggling to draw my fans just as he closed in on me and dealt a stunning blow to my head.

Convulsions wracked my arms. I lost my grip on both weapons. I tried to get up and foundered. "All right, lassie, let's see what you really look like," growled my enemy, as he swiftly wrenched my silken face mask off.

Then he dropped the mask, an expression of absolute shock plastered upon his features.

" _Princess!_ " he gasped, as I painfully steadied myself and climbed to one knee. "I- I thought you were dead! I grieved for you, my Princess. I rejoice to know that you live-"

A strike to his solar plexus interrupted his stream of chatter. "You should have killed me when you had the chance," I hissed, pressing my advantage.

"No! I was loyal to you," he wheezed, backing away. "I couldn't stop Shao Kahn from killing your parents, so I tried to save you and your sister. But I couldn't carry both of you-"

"My sister is just fine, no thanks to rebel scum like you!" I spat, hitting him again. If I had known then what I do now, I would not have wasted energy talking to him, but I had been young and unlearned. "What's wrong?" I taunted, when he failed to rise again. "You were so eager to fight a few seconds ago!"

"You are the Princess. I cannot hurt you, I-"

 **"FINISH HIM!"** I obeyed the Master's unforgiving command, constricting the breath from my enemy's throat before he could utter another word.

( _~He spared your life, and you repaid him with death.~_ )

( _He was a criminal!_ ) my mind cried out. My eyes remained locked on the face of the dying man. Two slight tears trickled from the corners of his eyes as his skin swiftly changed color from pink to deathly blue. He did not struggle.

( _~His only 'crime' was that he escaped with your twin sister minutes before Shao Kahn's forces completely overran the former rulers' palace.~_ )

( _Mileena? But she-_ )

( _~Not Mileena.~_ )

( _The Master has always owned the Palace-_ )

( _~Since the blood-drenched day of his coup d'etat.~_ )

( _I'm not a 'Princess,' I was an orphan Master Kahn adopted after the Great War!_ )

( _~Shao Kahn was the one who personally orphaned you.~_ )

( _None of what that convict said could be true! He was just telling lies to trick me into letting him go!_ )

( _~If self-preservation were his sole motive, you would not be alive today.~_ )

The surroundings blurred and lost their focus... then resolidified into the bleak, gravelly landscape of the Wasteland. The dirt was an unnatural, purple-black color, a permanent side effect of some terrible spell or godly struggle during the Great War. Screams, shouts, and battle cries echoed on every side. I observed the maelstrom, seeing Master Kahn's elite foot soldiers and wyvern cavalry press upon the sorely outnumbered members of the Black Moon mutant clan. If the clan had not been ambushed, they might have put up a better fight; but before the onset of the attack, I had cut the throats of their five sentries. Most of the mutants were extremely thin and weak. Over half of them were women and children who lacked the strength or the will to put up much of a struggle. Many tried to flee, but the Master's troops ringed them on all sides and above. There was nowhere for them to escape.

"YOU!" The ragged cry was my only warning. Cursing myself for not being more attentive, I ducked and rolled. The trajectory of a scythe-like blade missed me by scarcely an inch. "You lead them here! You come, you offer to bring food; you bring death instead!"

My response was to throw one of my bladed fans at the mutant, who I recognized as the leader of the Black Moon tribe. He deflected the fan by shielding himself with one of his sickle-blade hands. He lunged for me again, but this time I was fully prepared. I leaped high into the air, up and over him. As I was just above his head, I touched it with my index finger, adding an iota of extra momentum to his missed charge. Incorporating a half-turn into my midair somersault, I landed on my feet facing my overbalanced enemy, who fell forward. Before he could get up and threaten me again, I stepped closer and decapitated him with a single swipe of my fan.

I heard a peculiar _thunk_ from behind and turned around. Another mutant writhed in agony. The tips of two swordblades peeked through his gaunt chest. At first his upraised right hand gripped a knife; then the blades in him twisted, and he dropped his weapon. A slash with my fan swiftly put him out of his misery. The swordblades lowered, allowing the headless corpse to slide off them and sink to the ground.

I looked into the solid red, pupilless eyes of the blades' owner. He was clearly one of the strongest members of the Black Moon tribe; certainly, he appeared better fed than most of the others. His ragged clothing was spattered with bloodstains, as were his forearms and the sharp blades extending from within them, like aberrantly long talons. A single twitch of his fingers made the dripping blades retract into whatever sheaths lay embedded in his flesh.

"Baraka watch your back. Baraka on your side," growled the mutant.

By then, the last fighters of the Black Moon tribe had fallen. Of the original clan of fifty, only fifteen prisoners remained alive. They were mostly women and children who had surrendered, except for Baraka. The Master's elite army forced the survivors to kneel with their hands behind their heads. One mutant boy reached for a knife lying on the ground; the militiaman watching him drove a spear into his back. He shrieked twice before a second guard put another spear through his neck, silencing his cries.

Three more militiamen pointed their spears at Baraka. I held up my hand to stay them and addressed the squad leader.

"Report!"

"Four of our infantrymen are dead, six seriously wounded, a dozen more with minor wounds. We lost three of the ten wyverns and their riders. Seven of ours to thirty-five of theirs; that's not bad. Not as good as the Master might have liked, but not bad."

"I see."

"What about him?" the squad leader asked, jerking a thumb at Baraka.

"He wants to join us."

"Doesn't everybody. How do we know we can trust him?"

That was a good question. How could I be sure that Baraka wasn't secretly planning to exact revenge for the death of his kin? I briefly contemplated his long-toothed, sickly grinning face, then the similarly deformed faces of the row of cringing prisoners.

"You," I said to Baraka, "kill all the rest of your tribe, and we'll find a place for you." He acknowledged my offer with a grunt and set to his bloody task at once, under the watchful eyes of the troops.

"Seven to thirty-five? No, I'd say seven to forty-nine," I told the squad leader, with a confident smile underneath my mask. "The Master will be pleased."

The Black Moon started screaming.

( _~You bear responsibility for the murder of all these people.~_ )

( _Not people. Mutants._ )

( _~They speak, they think, they feel, they suffer. They are people.~_ )

( _They brought it on themselves! They raided the Master's tax convoy!_ )

( _~They were starving to death. They were desperate for food, or anything they could trade for food.~_ )

( _They could have sustained themselves upon the Master's aura, like everyone else._ )

( _~The Black Moon were locked in a blood feud with the Clan of the Severed Finger, and losing. If they had stayed within Shao Kahn's nourishing aura, the Severed Finger would have destroyed them.~_ )

( _They could have appealed to the Master-_ )

( _~Shao Kahn would have pit them against the Severed Finger one-on-one in his vile Arena, for sport, until the last of them fell.~_ )

( _I had to carry out the Master's orders!_ )

( _~What type of 'Master' gives such orders, and what type of servant carries them out?~_ )

The scene about me darkened, fading to jet black.

...and brightened again, this time in the Shokan Chamber of Worship. Red carpeting crisscrossed the floor of carved stone squares. A large, smoothly chiseled open pattern marked the far wall. Bright blue sky and fluffy cumulus clouds swirled beyond the aperture, for the Chamber of Worship is the topmost floor of a Shokan tower so high that it pierces through the Outworld's atmospheric layer of orange-grey haze. The tower's height had once embodied humanity's supplication to the gods in heavens. But after the Great War there were no gods left; only Master Kahn. And so the Chamber of Worship became a place for his servants to express their reverence.

At the chamber's apex, a woman in a white robe with gold trim stood behind a plain wooden pulpit. That in itself showed that something was amiss; Master Kahn's pastorate always lead his praises from behind a pulpit of gold studded with precious jewels. I crouched amidst the congregation of worshipers. I wore the plain white garb of a pilgrim, with a white scarf masking my face, so that I could blend in with the crowd. The disguise worked; no one gave me a second glace or suspected the nature of my mission. Before I acted, though, I wanted to be absolutely certain about the priestess' intentions, so I waited and listened to her sermon.

"Shao Kahn tells you that rebels started the Great War. Shao Kahn tells you that the gods blighted the land," said the priestess. I studied her carefully, noting her fluffy blond curls, her plain features, and her mismatched eyes, one blue and one green. Yes, she was definitely the one. "Shao Kahn LIES to you! Most of you are old enough to remember the truth; the rest know some friend or relative who can recall. This Outworld realm was once a place of beauty, and plenty. The palace housed a benevolent King and Queen. We were self-sufficient, industrious, and reverent of the gods. No, it was not an utopia, but it was a free land, and we were free to choose our own destiny!

"Then came the serpent. Shao Kahn was only a petty lord at first, who disguised his true nature with spells and false charm. Men and women flocked to his imperialistic banner, lured by his promises of conquest and power. He had come to conquer, make no error - he had come to conquer US! His army supported itself first with paltry raids, then wholesale campaigns of terror! Shao Kahn was not satisfied with the fearful loyalty of the neighboring tracts and fiefs; he wanted everything. _He_ is the one who started the Great War. He initiated the siege upon the land's rightful King and Queen, against the will of the gods!

"Shao Kahn waged a war of scorched earth. While his armies soaked the plains in blood, he wove spells to befoul the air, acidify the water, and poison the land! He murdered the King and Queen! The gods tried to stop him, but they lacked the faith and the support of the people. _We_ deserted the gods before they deserted us!

"Today, the only ones who can survive the toxic wastes of the Outworld are a hideously mutated strain of humanoids. And even they are as dependent as everyone else upon Shao Kahn for nourishment, because Shao Kahn's shadow blackens the land! He can only support so many people, so he constantly culls us down to smaller and smaller numbers, through death-matches in his odious Arena! He forces us to murder our neighbors and our kindred for his amusement!

"But hope is not lost. The land is not dead; only dormant, and it may yet be restored. The shadow priests prophesy a day when the gods shall return and Shao Kahn shall fall. That day can come - that day will come - only if you believe! You must hope, you must strive, you must have faith in the gods' return. And you must be ready to throw off the yoke that Shao Kahn has placed on your neck, to strike out for freedom and dare to act in the name of the Light!"

She had flung her arms wide with that last exclamation. Suddenly she stiffened, bringing one of her finely manicured hands toward her blue right eye. It delicately fingered the poison dart embedded deep within her eyeball, as if testing whether it were really there. Then she sagged, first leaning against the base of the stone opening behind her, then pitching backward through it, never to be seen again. Cries of panic sounded throughout the crowd. Everyone's eyes had been on the priestess; no one had noticed me bring my blowpipe down from my lips, reposition my scarf, and stealthily thread a path to the exit. The liquidation had proceeded without a flaw, although I decided I'd spent entirely too much time listening to the prophetess before I killed her.

( _~Her crime was that she told the truth. Her sentence, death.~_ )

(You _cursed the land, not the Master!_ )

( _~If we gods were the primary cause of the devastation, then wouldn't the land's scars have begun to heal by now? How much power can the curse of a god have if the god is not present to carry it out?~_ )

( _She was instigating rebellion-_ )

( _~Shao Kahn was the first to 'instigate rebellion.' Why do you only see what you want to see?~_ )

The scene faded, just like the others. ( _~And now, I shall show you a possible fate of the Mother Realm. If Shao Kahn is not stopped, he shall drain it as dry and bleak as the Outworld, plunging it into eternal darkness and slaughter. And he will seek gates to more worlds, and more, and more, for the void within him can never be filled.~_ )

I saw chaos, madness, and carnage, heard screams and sobs, and smelled the revolting odor of burning human flesh.

( _This is not real._ )

( _~Not yet, but it will become real if Shao Kahn has his way.~_ )

( _This is not real._ )

( _~Now do you understand? Now will you ally with us?~_ )

( _This is **not** real._)

( _~Little assassin, are you paying attention?~_ )

( _THIS IS NOT REAL!_ ) I shut my eyes to the specious vision and withdrew one of my fans - but this time, instead of assaulting the intangible deity, I lashed out at myself. I drew the fan's edge along my left shoulder and upper arm, stopping just above the hem of my elbow-length satin glove. The pain was a concrete, palpable thing within a construction of phantasms. Gripping the wound with my right hand, I focused on its sting, and blocked out the god's presence with my will.

"THIS IS NOT REAL!"

I sat up, next to my whickering wyvern, near the edge of the cliff face opposite the Portal and its faceless shadow priest guardians. The sky had the light-reddish hue of morning in the Outworld, and the ground was muddy with night rain and morning dew. Of the thunder god, there was no sign. The only evidence of the entire nightmarish encounter was the self-inflicted wound on my left arm. I was still holding it closed with my right hand. Small drops of blood had trickled down my forearm, pooling upon my left palm. The blood seeped through the porous weave of my satin gloves; both my hands felt wet, and sticky.

* * *

I bandaged my wound tightly, careful not to touch the cut with my hands, which felt unusually soiled and contaminated. My attempts to wipe them on my cloak did little to alleviate the sensation. I longed to wash them clean. Unfortunately, fresh water is virtually nonexistent in the Outworld; most of its rivers and pools are filled with a sickly-green sludge so acidic, it will melt the flesh off one's bones. I'd already used half of my sole flask of water to clean my wound. Prudence dictated that I save the second half for emergencies only. I didn't need to drink, since I was still within the boundary of the Master's sustaining aura, but there was no guarantee that my quest wouldn't take me beyond its reach.

Tracking down Liu Kang was not as difficult as I'd feared it would be. Roughly a quarter-mile away from the Portal, I found the place where the monk must have turned upon Shang Tsung. There were no footprints leading up the site. I guessed that Shang Tsung had been using a levitation spell to swiftly transport himself and his passenger to the city of Shokan. Liu Kang had probably refrained from attacking until the sorcerer was concentrating fully on the spell. Perhaps I should have tried to grill Shang Tsung more thoroughly about his struggle against Liu Kang. On the other hand, I doubted that the sorcerer would have cooperated. He stood to lose face if I were to succeed in my mission.

The chaotic scrabblings in the dirt and gravel of the battle site were too disorganized to sort clearly, and last night's brief rainstorm hadn't improved their visibility. Cursing Raiden under my breath, I dropped to one knee next to a large patch of scorched ground. I knew that Shang Tsung liked to summon waves of hellfire as a weapon in personal combat, so I figured the blackened area might be the residue of one such attack. The battle site also carried the deep imprints of a very massive animal... or was that two very massive animals? Shang Tsung had likely assumed the shape of a great beast, maybe more than one type of great beast, during the fight. I silently vowed that when I met Liu Kang, I would treat him with respect - I'd bring him down as quickly as possible, preferably with my throwing darts and the advantage of surprise.

The prints from the oddly stylized soles of Liu Kang's shoes led away from the site. At first they were in a straight path, relatively deep and far between; after about a mile, they grew closer and shallower. Reconstructing the scenario in my head, I surmised that Shang Tsung had either used his levitation spell to escape without leaving tracks, or assumed the shape of a bird and flown away. Liu Kang attempted pursuit, but the sorcerer outdistanced him. After Shang Tsung dropped out of sight, Liu Kang slowed to a walk, never once thinking to hide his trail.

Liu Kang's path unsteadily wound its way along the rocky, slightly hilly Wasteland of gravel and grime. The trail skirted the nearby border to the Living Forest. I could guess why Liu Kang didn't go into the forest; even at this distance, I faintly heard the screams, groans, sighs, and shouts of the fell trees that grow there. It is a place that can literally drive a weakened mortal mad.

The Living Forest, like so much else of the Outworld, was not always a malign place. Once, the trees did not have contorted outlines resembling faces superimposed upon their bark, nor shrill voices with which to cry, scream, or sob endless laments. That was a long, long time ago, ages before the Great War, a time when the forest was called the Huntsman's Woods. Then an ambitious young Fire Mage contested the sway of the gods. He took the name of "Inferno," and blighted realm after realm with his pyric reign of terror. At last one the gods responded; the spirit-beast Enkidu accepted Inferno's challenge to ritual single combat, and won. Inferno's punishment was eternal quarantine within the borders of the Huntsman's Woods. This did not sit well with the arrogant mageling; he ignited blaze after blaze in a mad attempt to burn his prison down. Enkidu appealed to the rest of the gods, and they pooled their divine resources to put a curse upon Inferno: in hopes of assuaging his thirst for power, they transformed him into a tree. Legend has it that Inferno's hatred ran so deep it infected the rest of the trees, turning them against all living things... especially other Fire Mages.

Fallout from the Great War further corrupted the forest. The plant life became so virulently poisonous that it killed off nine-tenths of the fauna and twisted the remaining tenth into misshapen, mutated parodies of their former selves. That the woods still stand at all is testimony to the endurance of what few life forms, animal or vegetable, survive within its bounds. Worse, there are rumors and fragments of legends that hint at an evil, fecund presence in the forest's heart... a thing that is not a god, but the progenitive member of a primeval race of cosmic foulness that precedes the gods, and that will endure long after the gods and all who worship them are dust.

I was glad Liu Kang hadn't entered the Living Forest. Its treetops are so dense that I would not have been able to see his spoor while flying wyvernback. Out in the open, the monk's trail was so clear I could follow it a-wing, guaranteeing that I would catch up with my quarry before the end of the day.

The disadvantage was that there was no way for me to sneak up on him. The minimal dips and surges in the landscape were too flat to completely conceal a person, let alone a wyvern. I would have liked to approach him while he slept, but I couldn't hang back and wait for him to collapse from exhaustion. He was still within the boundaries of mutant territory, and if any of the Outworld's mutant tribes crossed his path, I could forget about bringing him back "alive and unhurt."

When I first espied Liu Kang, I tried to quietly glide in on him from behind. Perhaps I could guide the wyvern down for a quick pass just above him, and fell him with a sleeping-sap dart before he could react.

At first, it seemed as though my plan was going to work. Liu Kang plodded in a wavering path, his eyes fixed rigidly in front of him. His shoulders slumped wearily and his feet dragged, both signs that he had gone without sleep for a while, very likely at least a day and a half. He wore a red and black pair of slacks, and nothing on his upper body except for a matching red headband. Drawing one of my sleeping-sap darts, I decided to target the small of his back. Even if my aim were off, the dart would still take full effect provided that it broke his skin.

The gap between myself and my quarry narrowed. I nudged the wyvern into a smooth glide fifteen feet above the ground, more than low enough for my purposes. Peering down over the shoulder of my mount, and holding the dart ready, I calculated the compensations I'd make for the slight breeze, my velocity, and the horizontal component of the distance to my prey. Liu Kang did not turn around, pause, or give any sign that he suspected my ambush. If he'd remain oblivious just a little longer, I would have him... right... about...

Now!

" _You_!" shrieked the monk, "YOU ARE SHANG TSUNG'S MINION!" Even as he screamed the vituperation, he turned around and leaped high into the air, extending his arms and pointing his hands toward me at the peak of his jump. A lightning-quick bolt of thin fire shot from his outstretched hands. It hit the wyvern in the chest. The beast squawked, more from panic than pain, and back-pedaled with its wings. Its sudden lurch interrupted my throw, and my dart went wide.

The cur of a monk was faster than me!

"DIE!" screeched Liu Kang, jumping a second time and sending another spirit-fire blast in my direction. I had no time to speculate how a common Mother Realm mortal could have acquired such mystic power, because the shot hit my wyvern in the right wing. It squealed, tucked in the burned member, and dropped like a stone. Had we been higher up, I might have been able to coax it back into a glide before it crashed. I might also have crashed with it and dashed my brains out. At the time, though, I knew that it was too late to save the wyvern. I swung my right leg over its shoulder and used its neck as a springboard to leap away. The wyvern buckled again at the moment of my attempt. Suddenly deprived of a surface from which to push off, I barely made it clear of the beast before it crashed. I pulled myself into a tuck, attempting to flip and land in a crouch, but my momentum was lacking and I couldn't to rotate fully about. I hit the ground on my back.

Hard.

Part of my training to serve the Master included the art of acrobatics, and one of the first things an acrobat learns is how to fall. I have practiced and practiced, so many times that my body reflexively knew some of the right things to do long before my mind could have puzzled it out. Tucking my chin in tight to protect my head, I maximized my body's surface area to lessen the risk of damage to any single part. My arms slapped back, soaking up some of the shock into my chest muscles; my feet slammed down so that my lower limbs would absorb some of the rest; and my back arched a trifle so that my spine would bend instead of snap. I kept my muscles tense for no longer than the very first instant of impact, then relaxed them to soften the collision.

It still hurt.

A lot.

The wyvern's keening wail abruptly ended in mid-screech, as the ground vibrated from its crash-landing. My body ached. At least none of my bones were broken. Of course, I still had Liu Kang to contend with. By letting my head fall to one side, I could glimpse his strangely-textured shoes approaching me. Well, I'd deal with him in a moment. Just as soon as the world stopped spinning.

"You," snarled Liu Kang, glaring down at me with vengeful rancor in his coal-black eyes, " _you are Shang Tsung's minion._ " Nothing could be further from the truth, but he was clearly in no state to be reasoned with. " _Die!_ "

I didn't see how he intended to kill me, because I was too busy summoning the strength I needed to survive. Curling my arms back and placing my palms on the ground just behind my head, I tucked in my body and rolled back for a modified kippup. I had been lying limp on a small hill, with my head at the lower part of its slope, so that my backward half-roll had a little help from gravity. I dearly hoped that my hands wouldn't lose their purchase on the rough gravel and dirt, and pushed off from them. Now I was fighting the pull of gravity to arch my back, extend both legs, and strike out with my flexed heels where I estimated Liu Kang to be. I was rewarded with a solid crack sound; as I half-twisted with the recoil of the move, I tried to land on my feet and almost succeeded, stumbling to my knees instead. The world's spinning had slowed somewhat, enough for me to keep my balance. Now, if only I could choke back the urge to vomit...

Liu Kang also seemed to have some trouble standing up. I saw blood trickling from the corner of his mouth; my attack must have struck him in the face and upset his equilibrium. Determined to press my limited advantage, I withdrew my second sleeping-sap dart. Liu Kang was barely five feet away from me, and still recuperating from my last attack; surely, there was no way he could evade my sting this time! With practiced competence, I let the dart fly. It sped through the air, perfectly on target with the monk's unprotected stomach-

-and bounced off his skin.

...which was turning deep green and resolving into a diamond-shape pattern of overlapping, reptilian scales. Liu Kang's frame stretched, unnaturally contorting into a streamlined, serpentine figure that grew taller and taller. Soon it abandoned the appearance of anything manlike, resolving itself into the supple outline of a gargantuan beast with the body of a serpent, the horns of a goat, the legs of a mongoose, and the head of a crocodile. Its only remotely human aspect was the acute hatred in its incandescent yellow eyes. Its jaws parted, revealing craggy teeth as long as my fingers.

Oh, shit.

 **"BURN!"**

The dragon's sonorous roar was so forceful that the ground quaked beneath my feet. Once again, my instincts and reflexes reacted more swiftly than my thoughts, and I sprang away in a haphazard backward flip. I heard the whoosh of superheated air as a cone of livid flame missed me, scarring a portion of the ground instead. I immediately followed the flip with a back handspring, turned in midair to land facing away from the beast, and sprinted out of range of its fiery breath.

 **"YOU WILL BURN."**

Fortunately for me, the dragon could not advance very quickly. It was wingless, and its legs were diminutive in proportion to its body. It nearly tripped over itself when it tried to shamble in my direction. I deduced that Liu Kang must be unfamiliar with the dynamics of his draconic form. He seemed to be a fast learner, though; the dragon soon abandoned trying to walk like a common quadruped, and instead started to alternately shift its front and hind legs in tandem, wriggling forward like a colossal inchworm. Anticipating its assault, I drew one of my fans and crouched.

When it was close enough to breathe its searing flames upon me, I took two steps and vaulted toward it at the same moment as it reared back on its hind legs. The instant it unhinged its cavernous jaws, I hurled one of my fans sideways into its mouth. The rotating, bladed edges of my fan lodged firmly just short of the dragon's upper throat, cutting into the unarmored flesh of its inner mouth. The dragon emitted a shrill cry oddly reminiscent of my wyvern's last squeal and jerked its head back and forth, spitting and flaming. Drops of blood flew from its maw and spattered on the desolate ground, where they hissed and smoked.

Charging toward it again, I followed up my initial attack with a flying kick to its lighter-green snake's belly, just below where I expected its rib cage to be. It nearly doubled in half from the impact, but did not fall over backward. I had underestimated the flexibility of its sinuous body.

Tumbling to the ground, I didn't realize the seriousness of my miscalculation until I started to get up and the dragon snapped its tail at my feet. The attack came so fast that I wasn't aware of it until after I crashed again, this time falling on my injured left shoulder. Too late, I comprehended that the beast was only slow when it had to travel a sizeable distance; at close quarters, it had the speed of a venomous snake. Before I could execute another kippup, it pinned me down with its forelegs, immobilizing my arms. I tried to kick it; it didn't even notice. My fan was still in its mouth. It crunched its jaws together, shredding the fan's paper and grinding the metal. Then it spat the crushed remnants of my weapon to the side. One of the droplets of dark red blood dripping from its mouth landed on my collar, where it itched and burned and seared like a brand.

 **"YOU... YOU _HURT_ ME..."**

I felt its claws dig into my right side, lacerating my skin. Even if the dragon's curving talons didn't pin my arms, even if I could have pulled a dart out of my cloak, even if I had the strength to throw it, it would have bounced off the beast's scaly hide just like the last time. The dragon glared down at me, and I saw my eradication in its glowing yellow eyes.

I had died before. This was different. After the dragon killed me, it would either ingest my remains or leave them to rot at the edge of the Wasteland, where no one would ever find them. Master Kahn would not be able to bring me back. I faced my permanent annihilation. And do you know what bothered me the most? My hands still felt gritty and sticky. I'd never had the opportunity to clean them. Now, I never would. I didn't understand why I felt such bitter vexation over so trivial a matter, yet the emotion was very real. I wish I could say that I stared defiantly up at the dragon, ready to go to oblivion like a steadfast warrior; the truth was, I shut my eyes closed and wished desperately for a second chance to get the damn blood off. The swish of displaced air and the warm puff of the dragon's respiration brushed against my face, as it brought its jaws down toward my head.

Then I felt the warm touch of someone else's hand in mine, clasping it firmly. I opened my eyes and saw the world invert itself. Sky, sun, rocks, dirt, dragon, and orange-grey clouds whirled a full three hundred and sixty degrees, whipping by as I felt a corresponding pull in my gut. The strain upon my arm was so tremendous that I almost let go, but whoever or whatever held my hand squeezed it even tighter. At the periphery of my vision, I caught a fleeting glimpse of black streaked with red, and a face swathed in the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat. The swirling landscape halted; the grip on my hand loosened; and I wasn't sure whether I was collapsing on solid ground or leaning against a vertical wall.

I threw up.

"You're welcome," said my rescuer, pleasantly. He spoke the common tongue with a faint hint of Mandarin accent, and his voice was so smoothly lyrical that it made me want to hear him sing.

 **"WHO DARES TO STEAL MY PREY?"**

I was wondering that myself, but before I could get a good look at him, he pointed to the border of the Living Forest and urged, "Run! I'll hold him off. It's all right; he probably won't kill me."

"'Probably'?"

"I said go, _go_ , GO!" he shouted, with an ungentle shove in the indicated direction. At a loss for anything better to do, I staggered forward. Behind me, I heard him strike up a bizarre banter with the monstrosity.

 **"YOU!"**

"Is that any way to greet your old friend Kung Lao?" Acidic irony laced the question, lending it a keenly whetted edge.

 **"GET OUT OF MY WAY. NOW."**

"For shame! Didn't your mother tell you not to go around eating princesses? They're dangerously addictive. It starts with just one. Then another, and another, until you just _can't stop_ and then you're a disgrace to society and they have to dispatch knights in shining armor to deal with you-"

 **"Rrrrrrr..."**

"-and there's a grand battle that some talented fellow will turn into a poem with ten thousand lines, but the upshot is you're lying dead with a magic sword through your heart-"

 **"...rrrrrrRRRRR..."**

"-and some quick-thinking Hollywood agent turns the whole thing into a _fantastic_ home video and merchandising bonanza, except that unfortunately you're no longer around to cash in on the royalties. Honestly, Liu Kang, don't you know any better?"

 **"...RRRRRRAGH!"**

I stumbled to my knees, holding my bleeding right side, and turned around in time to see the dragon disgorge another fiery gout. The air tingled with the charge of sorcery; Kung Lao's outline wavered, ascended, and disappeared, reappearing near the beast's left flank. The dragon's firestorm breath blasted a patch of ground close to where he had previously been standing, though I noted that the beast's aim was off. I ducked behind a small upheaval of sedimentary rock, then peered around its edge at the strangely compelling struggle between dragon and man.

Who was this Kung Lao, and what in all the Astral Planes was he trying to do? Get himself killed?

"Bzzzt! Sorry, wrong answer, but don't worry, you still get to take home our fabulous consolation prize!" Kung Lao removed his hat and hurled it like a discus. The hat's rotating brim sparkled with reflected light. I realized that the brim must be edged with a shiny substance, probably metal. The twirling hat made the air whistle as it curved sharply upward, clipped the dragon across the chin, and arced swiftly out of sight. Yet when I returned my gaze to Kung Lao, I saw either the same hat or an identical copy on his head. More magic.

The blow hadn't really injured the dragon, merely annoyed it. Its lips peeled back in an irate snarl, and it gnashed its obsidian teeth. Kung Lao worked his teleportation spell again, reappearing on the beast's right side, although this time it was ready for him. As soon as he resolidified, the dragon lashed its tail at his feet, tripping him just like it had felled me only moments before.

"That didn't hurt," Kung Lao commented buoyantly, transforming his fall into a graceful reverse somersault. The dragon raised its head in preparation to strike. Kung Lao started to stand up, saying, "And now, for my next trick-"

The dragon's triangular head descended.

Kung Lao spun.

From one knee, he pushed with his free leg, turning on the pivot of the other leg's joint at first, then extending his arms and bringing them in as he rose. His rotation rapidly picked up speed. Again, the air crackled with occult power, only this time it carried quadruple the strength. Visible ripples of frosty white energy swirled around him, pushing outward with such force that I felt a whisper of their pressure even from my distant vantage point. The dragon may have tried to reverse its downward momentum, but it did not have enough time. A small explosion popped the air as the beast collided with Kung Lao's barrier. The dragon's head snapped back, its spine curling into an inverted curve; yet its hind claws remained firmly anchored, and it did not lose its balance.

The dragon whipped its head forward. Its abdomen flexed wide, a telltale signal that it was about to spew fire once more. Kung Lao slowed his spin, but the dragon opened its jaws before he came to a stop, and I knew he would not be able to dodge in time. The roaring, rushing sound of the dragon's blast completely drowned out my useless cry of warning. I could do nothing but watch-

-as the dragonfire again fell short of where Kung Lao stood.

In addition to singing his garments and blistering his skin, the inferno's backlash knocked Kung Lao off his feet. He sailed several yards through the air before half-crashing, half-skidding to earth just opposite of my hiding place. I saw him use the same techniques that I have practiced to help cushion his fall.

"...okay, that did hurt," he remarked, much more weakly than before. He rolled to his side, wincing, and slowly climbed to his knees. Then he saw me and hesitated. "You're still here? Kitana, I told you to ru-"

"Behind you!" I gasped.

Kung Lao pivoted in place; perhaps he attempted to summon his occult shield, but before he could make even one complete revolution the dragon's front claws slammed him back on the ground. The beast's great weight pinned his torso and both his arms, trapping him just as I had been trapped. I cowered behind the rock, desperately trying to come up with some plan of action. My hands itched, and my side felt like there was an iron spike in it; pain and discomfort chipped away at my ability to reason. I knew that among all my weapons, only my drugged darts had a prayer of felling the beast before I slipped into shock. Or maybe I was already in shock. That would explain why I'd been crouching here like a stupefied animal, instead of doing something to increase my odds of survival.

The border of the Living Forest was barely a hundred yards away, yet it might as well have been a hundred miles. The dragon was too close for me to sprint the rest of the distance; if I were to try, it would see me and probably burn me before I crossed the halfway mark. I could have gambled that its flames would miss, just as they had missed Kung Lao; but I knew too little about the variables to estimate my chances. And that was given that I could run more than few steps. At the rate I was bleeding, I would be lucky to stand up.

At long last, my brain began to work properly. I cut a strip of fabric off my cloak and used the cloth to bandage the wound in my side. My injury ached more than ever, but at least the action distracted me from the irritating itch on my stained hands. It took a little time to do; fortunately, the dragon's attention was fixed entirely upon the man it had ensnared.

 **"I HAVE HAD _ENOUGH_ OF YOUR ANTICS,"** it bellowed, pausing to inflect every word, **"AND MORE THAN ENOUGH OF _YOU_. YOU _NEVER_ KNOW WHEN TO QUIT, DO YOU?"**

"All right, you got me." Kung Lao sounded unusually calm for someone at the mercy of a fire-breathing behemoth. "So, what's next, Liu Kang? Are you going to bite my head off? Crush my thoracic cavity into so much paste? Am I hors d'oeuvres? Entree flambe, perchance?"

 **"DON'T TEMPT ME."** The breath rushed out of Kung Lao's lungs. The dragon must have increased the pressure of its hold, I thought, as I tied a sloppy knot on a pathetic bandage that probably wouldn't do me any good at all. Why did I bother, anyway? The dragon would eventually shift its attention back to me and kill me. There was nothing I could do about it, because none of my weapons could scratch its hide, and - wait one moment.

It had taken me long enough, but I finally had an idea.

I stood and shouted, "Liu Kang! Dragon! Understand this - I am _not_ Shang Tsung's minion!" The dragon's head swivelled in my direction. It seemed unwilling to release its prisoner, just as I had hoped. And I was out of range of its bite, so that it would probably try to...

 **"YOU! YOU WILL BURN,"** the beast rumbled, noisily drawing breath.

"Liu Kang, no!" Kung Lao cried.

I dashed toward the dragon, then poured all that was left of my strength into a final leap, timed to coincide with the moment the beast cocked its head back. The dragon opened its jaws, ready to spew forth a torrent of flame, and I threw an envenomed dart into its mouth.

The sleeping-sap I use on my darts is extremely potent. The original, instantly lethal toxin is harvested from the Trees of Muffled Death, near the heart of the Living Forest. No small amount of complex sorcery goes into the refinement process, which can only be performed on the anniversary eve of the Great War's first battle. When injected into any portion of the bloodstream, the refined substance nigh-instantaneously slows all bodily functions down to the bare minimum necessary to sustain life. Once my sleeping-sap darts prick someone or something, he, she, or it is as good as dead if that's what I want. Unfortunately, the toxin's collection and distillation are so fraught with peril that I never have more than four or five darts at my disposal for the length of a year. Otherwise, my job would be a great deal easier.

The dragon's exhalation turned into a strained wheeze. Instead of fire, only a few sparks and small plumes of smoke escaped its mouth. It rocked back on its hind claws, releasing Kung Lao, and voicing a wordless cry that ended in a whimper. Its eyes fluttered closed and it flopped on the ground like so much coiled rope. The monstrosity's outline lost clarity and resolution, dimming, shrinking, fading... until there remained only the half-naked body of an insensate monk.

"I sincerely hope you haven't killed him," Kung Lao cautioned, gravely. All traces of his lighthearted former banter had evaporated. He approached Liu Kang's still form and lightly rested his fingers on the monk's neck, feeling for a pulse. I tried to comprehend Kung Lao's insane concern for the man-beast that nearly destroyed him, and failed. I looked for my wyvern; when I saw its unmoving, broken-necked body, I tried to think of a safe way to transport Liu Kang to Shokan, and failed. Lastly, I tried to halt my own, creeping descent into unconsciousness, and failed in that as well.

* * *

My dreaming mind recalled clues that had slipped past my waking notice.

I remembered the legend of Kung Lao, often called "the Great," a Shaolin warrior who had once defeated Shang Tsung in single combat. Kung Lao spared Shang Tsung's life and banished him from Shaolin lands. A few years later, Shang Tsung returned to the Shaolin martial arts Tournament with the Outworld prince Goro. Goro ruined Kung Lao's body and Shang Tsung took the Shaolin warrior's soul, in addition to the souls of his family and friends. The Tournament remained in Shang Tsung's hands for five hundred years, until... well, you already know the rest. But if the Great Kung Lao and all his kindred were gone, then who had sorcerously distorted space to pull me out from under the dragon's claws? The unanswered question slipped out of my mental grasp, deteriorating into entropy before I could examine it any further. Everything grew darker, fading first into grey, then night, then inky blackness.

I felt a loathsome itch on my hands.

It consumed every square inch of their skin, even underneath my fingernails. In an effort to relieve the consuming burn, I wiped my hands on my clothing, and wrung them so strenuously as to risk damaging my fingers. The detestable sensation only intensified, flaring into a rash I could not withstand and could not assuage. It spread, slowly, maddeningly, to engulf my wrists and forearms.

A small, concentrated pool of furiously bright light manifested close to me. It coalesced into the face of a blond woman, who might have been considered attractive if not for the fletched poison dart lodged firmly in her right eye. The light dimly showed her arm and hand, which were pointed straight at me.

( _You killed me,_ ) she intoned, in a reedy, hollow parody of her sermon voice. I tried to back away, and ran into a solid wall of warm, concentrated blackness. Make that hot, concentrated blackness... scalding hot...

( _Go away,_ ) I snapped to the apparition. She did not leave. The sickly-purple, distorted face of a man appeared next to her.

( _My Princess, you killed me,_ ) he rasped, in a mournful whisper. Both figures took a step forward. The heat intensified.

( _Leave me alone!_ )

More faces and figures appeared, shambling and calling out to me, each frozen in the moment of death. Men, women, and children, humans and mutants, young and old enclosed me in a tightening ring. There was no escape. My heart pounded; I pressed up against the wall; and my hands felt like they were being seared in a bonfire.

( _You kill us all,_ ) hissed the sharp-toothed, grinning head of an Outworld mutant, with a black quarter-moon tattoo upon its cheek. A pair of arms bearing sickle-shaped blades carried the head, arms attached to a decapitated body.

( _Yes, yes I did!_ ) I shouted back at them, curling my agonized hands into fists. ( _And there's nothing you can do about it! You're dead, you're all dead, dead and gone forever!_ )

( _And you're not?_ ) sneered a young mutant boy with the point of a spear protruding through his neck. He reached for my face with his clawed fingers.

I fumbled for my darts, for my fans, for any weapon at all; but the affliction on my hands had increased to the point where it destroyed their dexterity. I forced my hands up into a defensive stance, despite their crippling pain. What little light there was reflected on them, revealing flowing rivulets of dark blood, grotesque scraps of torn flesh, and shards of reddish-white bone. A creeping rot burrowed through them, withering and peeling away skin, muscle, and leathery tendons. Worse, it was spreading; I could feel it delving further down my arms, working its corruptive decay inward. When I tried to speak again, black bile gushed from my mouth and spattered the front of my body. It felt like acid - no, not like acid, like a hundred thousand tiny insects digging in to eat me alive. An approving murmur circulated through the gathering of walking corpses.

I screamed.

...and screamed, and screamed; even when I woke up from the nightmare, a part of my mind continued screaming, while the rest of me huddled in a fetal position and wished for it all to go away.

"Shh, easy. You're safe here. You're going to be fine. We were worried for a while, but you've pulled through the worst of it."

Who...? No, wait. I recognized that voice.

"You - you're supposed to be dead too..." I whispered to Kung Lao. I kept my dirty hands pressed tightly over my eyes, for fear of seeing him as horribly mutilated as all the others.

"The rumors have been greatly exaggerated, I promise you." His comment was dry, but not unfriendly. "Are you all right? Can I get you anything?"

"Water," I croaked.

"Coming right up." He handed me a small leather flask, then made a puzzled sound when I poured its contents on my hands and rubbed them vigorously. The cool wetness helped a little, but didn't completely remove the sense of dirt, staining, and foulness. If I peered closely, I thought I could still see tiny flakes of dried blood embedded in their skin, and underneath my fingernails. I dug the cuticles of my right hand deep into the back of my left, trying to scratch away the offending filth.

"Um... what are you doing?" Kung Lao asked, hesitantly.

"I need soap. And a washcloth."

"Huh? Hey, hey-" he grasped my wrists and pulled them apart. "What on earth are you doing to yourself? Are you sure you're okay?"

I looked down at my hands, which I'd nearly scratched raw. They still didn't feel right, but I'd have to deal with them later. "I'm... fine." He nodded and let go.

"You sounded like you had a nightmare. I heard you cry out."

"It is nothing."

"Are you sure?"

I arduously tore my gaze away from my unfit hands, and looked up at him.

His apparel was eccentric, at best. The loose, sleeveless black vest draped over his chest had an emblazoned scarlet character that immediately summoned my attention. The character, which looked as if it had been painted by a large brush, was the symbol and word for force of arms. Beneath the vest, he wore a sea-blue jumpsuit. A pair of ebony shin guards, each with twin straps encircling his calves, held the jumpsuit's leg cuffs in place just above his white socks and flat black shoes. Layers of thick bandages wound about both his forearms. He still wore his atypical hat which, I noticed, was held snugly in place with a chin strap. It had a slight upward tilt, exposing his face.

His features were smooth and softly rounded. He might have appeared similar to Liu Kang, at first glance; a closer inspection revealed subtle differences. Kung Lao's skin had a lighter, more olive tint, and his short, dark hair was wavy instead of straight. His brownish-black eyes didn't have quite as sharp a slant, either. I suspected that, unlike Liu Kang, Kung Lao was not purely of Middle Kingdom blood. He also seemed shorter than I might have expected. Wasn't the Great Kung Lao supposed to have been taller, and more muscular...?

"I think I'll let that slide," he said wryly, leaning back in the wicker chair opposite my bedside. I hadn't been aware of speaking that last thought out loud - an inadvisable habit for anyone in my line of work. "Anyway, I assume you're curious about what happened. Well, you weren't in very good shape, so I put a few more bindings around that hole in your side and carried you here. 'More muscular,' indeed... oh, wait," he quickly continued, lifting his left hand and displaying its palm, "I said I was going to let that slide."

"Liu Kang?"

"He's also here."

"Where is 'here'?"

"The Living Forest. We're inside Jade's home. You'll have the chance to meet her soon. She brought Liu Kang here while I brought you; then she and I took turns applying a damp cloth to your forehead, and fanning you to keep you cool, until your fever broke. That gash in your side had become infected, you see. Fortunately, Jade knows a few things about healing and medicine, and you, Kitana, are about as tough as they come. You've been out of it for only two days. The rate at which you've been healing is simply astonishing."

"You are not native to the Outworld, are you?"

"You get a cookie!" His spoke the peculiar exclamation with such smooth, congenial zeal that it took me a moment to figure out what he meant.

"We are at the edge of Master Kahn's aura. That is what supplies the needs of the body, and speeds its natural recovery." Did I see him flinch a little when I referred to the Master?

"Yes, yes, I've heard about that. Must wreak havoc on the fast-food chains."

"Have you also heard that Master Kahn can recall us from death, if he so chooses?"

There was no mistaking that response - shock mixed with horror. "Did you say - from _death_?"

"Yes."

"So that is how Shang Tsung returned to plague the living," he reflected, shuddering. I found his superstitious attitude toward a common fact of Outworld life very strange indeed. "I wonder what it must be like..."

"To be brought back from the dead?"

"Er... on second thought, never mind. Is there any limit to... um, to this power he has?"

"It is impossible to recall someone without a portion of the cadaver, and virtually impossible to recall one who has been deceased for more than three days. Master Kahn might be able to do it, if the soul of the departed individual had a strong enough will, but the energy cost would be prohibitively high - it increases more sharply with each passing hour."

I studied his reaction to my mention of the Master more carefully, this time, and decided I didn't like it. Normally, I would not have so freely given information to a possible enemy, but this situation was definitely not normal, and I hadn't told him anything that wasn't common knowledge. Intent on learning more about this unorthodox warrior, I leaned forward and inquired, "Who are you?"

"Don't remember?" He stood up and bowed. "Kung Lao, at your service."

"Kung Lao died five hundred years ago."

"In Western terms, I suppose I'd be Kung Lao XIX."

"Kung Lao's entire family also died five hundred years ago."

He cleared his throat and raised his curled right hand just below his chin, as if holding an invisible object. In an enthusiastically affected tone, he said, "And now it's time for everybody's favorite game show, Family Relations!" Switching back to his normal badinage, he continued, "The Great Kung Lao's eldest son once, well, it's a long story. The short version is, Kung Lao Junior (to use another Western appellation) was banished from Shaolin lands shortly after Shang Tsung's historic defeat. Junior's alleged crime was so terrible that the Great Kung Lao publicly absolved all blood ties; Junior was, for all practical purposes, no longer 'part of the family.' The Great Kung Lao also had all records of his wayward offspring destroyed or changed. Which turned out to be quite lucky for the young fellow, as Shang Tsung never learned of his existence, and Junior had the chance to live a long life in exile. Well, he had the chance, but he ended up dead in a Portugal bar brawl, leaving behind his ladyfriend and her soon-to-be-born illegitimate son. A century or two after that, the latest Kung Lao of the ragged family line got tired of being spat upon as a part-Chinese mongrel; so, he decided to return to the Middle Kingdom, where he could be spat upon as a part-Iberian mongrel instead. He found acceptance, or at least a lack of expectoration, in one of the Honan province's more remote Shaolin temples. I am the last of that line. And... the second to last of that Temple."

For one moment, his veneer of cheerful banter cracked. Looking at his face, I saw sorrow, grim resignation, and anguish. I cast my gaze down to the wooden floor because, strange as it may seem to you who have listened to me so tolerantly and for so long, I truly don't like pain.

"And that's... the story. I think I'll check on Liu Kang now, if you don't mind." Summoning his former whimsy, he added, "I don't know what you gave him, but he's been out like a light for as long as you have."

"Why do you have such concern for him?"

"He is my Shaolin brother."

"Didn't he try to kill you?"

"No, he did not," Kung Lao corrected, more soberly. "Twice, he could have; but he didn't. There is still a part of him that remembers. It is not too late for him - not yet."

I pondered this information after he left. If it were true... which it probably was... then Kung Lao had saved my life, but I had not saved his when I brought the were-dragon down. Which meant that I owed him a lifedebt. The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.

Feeling somewhat dizzy but not insurmountably so, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. I was wearing a loose robe; a folded change of clean clothes lay on a small table in the room's far corner. They were... an identical copy of my standard uniform? Intrigued, I examined them - a one-piece, black-belted leotard with matching elbow-length gloves and knee-high leggings, headband, and mask, all made of smooth satin. The only difference between them and my old garb was their color: light, silvery-grey instead of deep blue. There was even a brand-new sable cloak; I knew that it was not my own because it still had the stiffness of a garment not softened by years of wear, and because no strips had been cut off of it. It had pockets for concealing the array of weaponry that I usually carry, although they were mostly empty... except for a few which held what were either my fans, or ones just like them. I stowed the half-used flask of water in another of the cloak's folds.

Did this raiment belong to the one Kung Lao referred to as "Jade?"

My head swam with many other unanswered questions; I pushed them all back. Despite the madness of recent events, I had not forgotten my mission: to present the warrior Liu Kang, alive and unhurt, before the Master. Duty called. If I were to move quickly, perhaps I could subdue Kung Lao and depart with my prisoner before Jade returned. I would have preferred to search the dwelling for my possessions first, especially my darts and the unbreakable cord, but that would have taken too much time. Whoever Jade was, if she dressed like I did and used razor-edged fans like I did, then I did not want to risk confronting her. I didn't really need the cord to restrain Liu Kang because the sleeping-sap would keep him dormant for another five days. That gave me time enough to complete the return journey to Master Kahn's castle. As for my darts and other weapons, well, I'd just have to cope without them. At least I still had the unexpected bonus of my fans.

I stepped out of the bedroom. There were no windows in the small dwelling, only a short hallway with another two doors, a cramped central room, and a tightly shut exit. The entire building was composed of wood - fresh, young wood, which must have been thick enough to be soundproof, if Jade's home were truly within the clamorous Living Forest.

Careful not to make a sound, I approached the door next to mine and lowered my eye to its keyhole. Through it, I saw Liu Kang stretched out on a bed that was almost too small for his lanky frame. The unconscious monk's head had been carefully positioned to one side, a standard precaution to keep him from drowning in his own saliva or choking on his own tongue. Kung Lao kneeled nearby, his hands clasped and his head bowed, as though in prayer.

Easy pickings, I thought. Sneak in, hit him from behind, and abscond with Liu Kang. I knew that I probably ought to kill Kung Lao, who was almost certainly an enemy of the Master, and yet... Master Kahn hadn't instructed me to assassinate anyone while on my mission, not even by implication. The outlandish warrior had rescued me from certain destruction. Leaving him alive would be the least I could do. I moistened the door's hinges with water from the flask, preparing to silently swing it open just far enough for me to slip in.

A soft chant interrupted my task. Its rhythm gradually blossomed into a richly textured tenor, projected with inner strength. Kung Lao - it had to be - intoned each note with flawless pitch, inflecting the melody with a wistful, mourning theme. I tried to make out his words, with only partial success. They seemed to be in a Middle Kingdom dialect that felt close to Mandarin, although I could be wrong. I am familiar with several foreign languages, including Mandarin, but not particularly fluent in any of them. I thought I detected the gist of the song's meaning, though, partly through what few lyrics I could understand, and partly through the sheer emotion of the music. It was beyond doubt a dirge... a lament of regret, and misery... or mayhap a plea that the lost souls of those closest to one might find peace, in the grey kingdom beyond the furthest borders of the Astral Planes.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

My hand slipped away from the doorknob. Very slowly, I turned around and returned to my room. Something blurred my vision slightly as I climbed into the bed; I touched my index finger to my right eye and lifted away a single tear, the first I'd ever shed since... since the day Mileena killed me, I suppose. Unwilling to spend any further thought on what it might or might not mean, I let my head rest against the soft pillows and drifted into thankfully dreamless slumber.

 **end part one of two**

* * *

 **Disclaimer: I am not Victar! I am merely crossposting his stories onto this site after obtaining his permission. With Victar's site being closed with the rest of AOL, I am posting his Mortal Kombat stories to FFnet to archive them. This story was written by him, and all credit goes to him.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: I am not Victar! I am merely crossposting his stories onto this site after obtaining his permission. With Victar's site being closed with the rest of AOL, I am posting his Mortal Kombat stories to FFnet to archive them. This story was written by him, and all credit goes to him.**

* * *

What in the Planes had I been thinking?

I jerked bolt upright and regretted it. The metal edges of the fans inside my cloak dug into my body, nearly cutting open my skin. I hadn't even removed the cursed garment before returning here and passing out like some ensorcelled wild beast. Perhaps I'd been much weaker than I'd felt at the time. That had to be it. How else could I have forgotten everything I knew about the raid on Liu Kang's Temple? Master Kahn had ordered Shang Tsung to carry it out, with the assistance of General Baraka and forty handpicked warriors. The raid had been successful, partly because the Master had used his immense will to temporarily project the troops' invulnerable avatars into the Mother Realm. All of Liu Kang's brethren perished... or so Shang Tsung claimed.

It would seem that at least one of Liu Kang's fellow monks escaped after all. Make that exactly one, provided that what Kung Lao had said was true. If only I did not owe him my life! Then my next course of action would have been perfectly clear. No matter. I had my mission to complete and I intended to see it through, regardless of who or what got in my way.

Once again, I stepped into the cramped hallway of Jade's home. There was no sign of her. Marveling at my good fortune, I noiselessly retraced my steps to the room that held Liu Kang. Kung Lao was still there, leaning back in a wicker chair identical to the one in my room. His hands were clasped over his stomach, and his head had fallen all the way forward, so that his chin rested on his chest. He appeared to be asleep. I monitored him carefully for a couple minutes before entering the room, to be certain that his breathing had the slow, shallow rhythm of one truly in the depths of slumber. It did. My luck seemed to be holding. I crept in and prepared to hoist the insensate Liu Kang...

"Going somewhere?" Kung Lao inquired, amiably.

Damn!

Half-expecting him to attack me, I spun around. He stood in front of the room's only door. His arms were folded across his chest, and his hat was tilted forward so that the shadow of its brim darkened his face. I dearly missed my last sleeping-sap dart. If necessary, I might be able to physically overpower the warrior, with or without killing him. Then again, I might not. After all, I had seen him match his fighting skills against a dragon and acquit himself remarkably well. He hadn't initiated an assault yet; perhaps I could talk my way out of this and try again later.

"I don't know what you mean." I lied calmly and evenly, a skill gained through practice.

"I mean, you're planning to leave and take Liu Kang with you, right?"

"You are mistaken."

"Don't you want to fulfill Shao Kahn's orders?"

"I don't understand."

"Shao Kahn's orders," he repeated, with a good-natured smile. When I gave him a blank stare, he coughed and quoted, **"KITANA, I CHARGE YOU TO BRING ME THE WARRIOR LIU KANG, ALIVE AND UNHURT,"** in an amazingly accurate mimicry of the Master's voice.

That was just too much.

" _Who are you!?_ " I yelled, whipping out my fans and holding one extended, its cutting edge one foot away from his throat. "How did you know my name, how do you claim to know so much about me? You do not talk like a simple monk! How did you conveniently appear just in time to save my life? _What do you seek to gain!?_ "

"Wait," he commanded firmly, although he wasn't quite looking me directly in the eye. I perceived that he had shifted from a full forward stance into a defensive position, presenting only the left side of his body. He kept his right arm crooked close to his chest, shielding his heart and lungs; his left arm was poised near his neck, prepared to block any attack to the great vein of his throat. Clearly, he was ready to defend himself. What worried me the most was the speed with which he had made the transition, so swiftly that I almost didn't see it happen.

I hate fighting people who are faster than me.

I did have one advantage over him - I held weapons; he did not. True, there was his idiosyncratic hat; but he hadn't reached for it yet. The moment he did, I could move in and slash him badly, perhaps mortally.

Maybe.

"Kitana, there is no need for threats. I will tell you what you want to know. Put away the fans." His request sounded stern, but not angry.

"Why shouldn't I kill you right now?" I bluffed.

"You could try. I wouldn't advise it. If you succeed, then I won't be in any condition to answer your questions. If you fail, then you won't be in any condition to ask them. Is that really want you want? Or are you just spoiling for a fight? You've recently had to doubt a great many things that you used to take for granted. It could be that you don't want to know the answers, because you are afraid of what you might learn."

"Perhaps you should not pretend to know my thoughts." I slowly lowered my extended weapon. Kung Lao did not relax his stance until I made my fans vanish within my sable cloak. As soon as they were no longer in sight, his mood promptly changed from austere to affable. Looking over my shoulder, he remarked, "It's all right, Jade; no harm done."

I whirled in place. Directly in back of me was a masked woman dressed in green garments tailored in precisely the same manner as mine, and holding razor-edged fans just like mine. If I had initiated any sort of attack on Kung Lao, she could have struck from behind and killed me as easily as I've ever killed anyone else.

"Jade, please," Kung Lao insisted, a little more emphatically, and the other woman performed an identical disappearing act with her fans.

"How...?" I trailed off. The corners of Jade's brown eyes crinkled a smidgen. I think she was smiling.

Ever since the day a long-toothed, grinning mutant scum soldier watched my back for me, I've trained intensely to hone my senses. It wasn't just that I hadn't seen or heard Jade... neither had I felt the presence of her body heat, nor tasted any scent of her on the air. And I still didn't. She was nonexistent save to my eyes.

"Jade has devoted her entire life to the arts of sensory invisibility, both mundane and mystical. She has a natural talent for it, and this is her territory. Here, no one can detect her presence unless she wants to be detected," Kung Lao explained. Jade did not add anything; she merely regarded me with that mysterious, faintly mocking gaze. "She is-"

"Wait," I interrupted, quieting him with a dismissive gesture. To Jade, "I want to hear what you have to say for yourself." One of her slender eyebrows lifted a bit, but she said nothing.

"You heard me," I pressed. Jade nodded and removed her mask in one, gracefully elegant motion. Her features were balanced and delicate, with the distinction of a tiny, discolored spot on her left cheek.

My eyes widened in shock.

This was impossible.

Kung Lao stepped forward. "Jade cannot speak. Shao Kahn's troops tore her tongue out for sport when they were looting the castle of both your parents, during the aftermath of the Great War. That was just before a man named Marcus intervened and escaped with her. You have met Marcus. He was the first person you ever killed.

"Jade is your real twin sister."

My legs were weak underneath me; I felt myself sinking irresistibly back and down into the wicker chair, where Kung Lao had been seated only a moment before. In disbelief, I stared at the woman before me... the woman with my face.

Kung Lao crossed his arms behind himself and started to pace back and forth. "Okay, let's take it from the top:

"I am Kung Lao. If you're not willing to accept that at face value, then never mind. What the hell, you can call me 'Patrick Swayze' if you want...

"I know about you, your background, and your mission from Raiden, the god of thunder. Soon after I entered your world, he appeared before me, showed me visions of many things, and left me sopping wet. He cannot use his godly powers to directly interfere with the Outworld - the Divine Sanctions forbid it - but that does not keep him from observing events, as only a god can.

"I do not 'talk like a simple monk' (that's another one I'll let slide) because I honed my fluency in English - what you call the common tongue - outside of the Shaolin Temple. When my parents were still alive, they sent me to be educated abroad, in America. It's a province of what you call the 'Mother Realm,' and if you were to go there, it would doubtless appear as bizarre to you as the Outworld does to me. Ask me to tell you about the game shows sometime.

"I was there to rescue you because I'd been trailing Liu Kang-"

"I did not find any evidence of your passage."

"Thank you very much. When I saw you and your wyvern fly overhead, I suspected the worst and hurried to catch up. Lucky for you I'm reasonably fast on my feet.

"Lastly, I seek to fulfill the legacies of my ancestors. And to do whatever I can to help Liu Kang find his destiny as well. Goodness knows he needs all the help he can get."

I shook my head. "Even if I were to find this... plausible... the rest of what you say cannot be true." I looked at the woman who wore my face, searching for some inkling to disprove the mad conjectures whirling in my head.

Jade presented me with a sheaf of papers.

"What are...?"

"Please read them," urged Kung Lao. "Then you may understand."

I quickly skimmed their contents.

 _"...the Kahn's troops seized control of those Outworld planes which are closest to being synchronized with the resonations of the Earth Realm. Shao Kahn executed the former rulers, took over their castle... slaughtered most of the region's indigenous population... he is intensely recruiting new soldiers._

 _One such conscript is the infant daughter of the Outworld's former rulers, whom the Kahn calls 'Kitana.' I warned him that he ought to kill her at once... Shao Kahn asserts that Kitana will be raised loyal to him, and ignorant of her true lineage..._

 _The Outworld has become a barren, despoiled place under Shao Kahn's rule... the Kahn has to expend a great deal of energy to mystically sustain his troops in the absence of edible food or drinkable water..."_

Ten minutes later, I looked up from the papers and charged, "Do you honestly expect me to believe that this was copied from Shang Tsung's journal?" Jade shrugged, silently regarding me with a distantly quizzical expression. Kung Lao sighed, the first indication I'd seen that his patience was not infinite.

"We cannot 'expect you to believe' anything, Kitana. Your thoughts and beliefs are your own. Only you can shape them."

I absently riffled through the papers. If what they said about the Master and me were true, then what had I done with my entire life? That question was too terrible to contemplate. Anyone could have fabricated the entire sheaf; there was no proof that a word of it had been copied from Shang Tsung's journal. Underneath the satin of my silvery-grey gloves, I felt an intolerable rash on my hands and curled them tightly, my fingernails pressing into my palms.

"One more thing," Kung Lao interjected, before I could voice another denial. "Your mission is to bring Liu Kang to Shao Kahn. We want to help you." The collection of papers slipped between my afflicted fingers and fluttered every which way, falling all over the floor. "Shao Kahn wants Liu Kang and as many other warriors as he can find to fight in his Tournament. It is Liu Kang's destiny to fight in the Tournament. It is my destiny to fight by his side. We all want him to get there in one piece. We should join forces to achieve a mutual goal."

"Never!" I snapped, standing up, while Jade knelt to collect the scattered pieces of paper. "Your suggestion is ludicrous. You are insane. No! Not under any circumstances whatsoever!"

Kung Lao tilted the brim of his broad hat upward, diffusing the shadow it cast on its face, and flashed his characteristically good-natured, pearly white grin. "Can you think of a single reason why not?"

I tried.

Master Kahn forgive me, I tried.

* * *

I picked my way along the floor of the Living Forest, carrying the rear end of a makeshift stretcher, upon which rested the comatose Liu Kang. Kung Lao supported its front end. Jade scouted ahead, navigating our progress. Ignoring the building ache of fatigue from a long day's march, I wished for the thousandth time that I could have ridden the wyvern back. "Why did I ever let you talk me into this..."

"Because I have a charming smile?"

"Be quiet, stop grinning like an idiot, and look where you're going before you walk into a tree."

"I bet you say that to all the guys."

Jade glanced sharply over her shoulder, quieting our bickering. Not that anyone or anything more than half a dozen feet away could have heard it, over the Living Forest's tremendous clamor. Nor had we been chattering much during our journey; I had little to say, and Kung Lao had been unusually withdrawn all morning and afternoon, ever since we left Jade's residence.

I did not trust Kung Lao or the mysterious woman who claimed to be my sister, but the reasons to accept their offer of a temporary alliance had rapidly accrued. The journey back to Master Kahn's castle would probably take four days under the best of conditions. Without Kung Lao's aid, the burden of carrying Liu Kang by myself could have slowed me further. And Jade's assistance was most helpful; she knew the Living Forest well enough to guide us through it, on a straight path to Shokan. I couldn't have traveled through the eldritch woodlands without her; I'd have ended up walking in circles. Yes, the benefits of a compact far outweighed the dubious risks, at least in the short run...

So why did I feel so uneasy?

The more the trees shrilled, the more I spared darting glances before and behind me, intently searching for danger. Was it my imagination, or was the forest's eerie howling increasing in volume with every step we took? Sometimes I thought I heard the screams of my former victims, and I had to concentrate upon blocking them out. I couldn't shake the feeling that I had overlooked something very important... but what? The abstract fear curled into a tight ball within me, causing my throat to run dry and my skin to turn clammy with sweat. Perhaps it was just the relentless barrage of the trees' wailing. I suppose I could have worn earplugs, but I was reluctant to disable one of my keenest and most informative senses. At least I had persuaded Kung Lao and Jade to give me back my darts, unbreakable cord, and hidden array of sharp steel and cold wire. With each step, I felt the implements in my new cloak's pockets slap against my body, and derived a small measure of comfort from the sensation.

A minimum of light filtered through the dense, leafy canopy above; still, there was enough illumination for us to perceive reasonably well, and note the difference when the day waned into grey twilight. The moon peeked from between the treetops, then was swallowed up by a passing cloud. We pressed on, planning to complete our trek through the Living Forest before the world became pitch-black. I craned my neck and peered around Kung Lao's shoulder, trying to glimpse the Wasteland's border between the tall clusters of copse-encircled trees.

Something moved.

"Wait!" I enjoined, just loudly enough for the others to hear. Jade looked back at us and asked a question with her eyebrows. I couldn't have begun to answer it. All I knew was that my instincts were screaming in panic. I set down my end of Liu Kang's stretcher and drew my fans, slowly turning around in a circle. The ground trembled perhaps the slightest bit more than it usually did from the endless noise. The air tasted thick and heavy with acrid sap. The leaves of the trees rustled all about us, though I couldn't feel a breeze. Everything was wrong, and nothing was wrong. Exchanging glances with Kung Lao and Jade, I knew that they sensed it too.

A ropy tentacle encircled my throat.

I slashed with my fans, severing it. The section around my neck still adhered, though no longer so tightly as to cut off my breathing. More slimy tendrils descended from above. There was no time to curse myself for failing to look up, all I could do was turn, swipe, and dodge, praying that I wasn't headed directly into the path of another attacker. Jade cried out, a wordless exclamation that rang octaves above the forest's ever-present moaning. I ducked, rolled, caught a glimpse of Kung Lao cutting at something with his bladed hat, and struck out at a presence that wriggled threateningly to my left.

The initial attack slackened. Kung Lao, Jade and I converged about Liu Kang's still form, back to back, scanning the undulating ripples of the darkened woods for our enigmatic adversaries. I ripped off the thing that clung to my throat and violently flung it away. It left puckered welts on my sore skin. The segment had felt rubbery and fibrous, like a vine with sucking cups. The Living Forest's constant outcries changed, permuting into an urgently emphatic chant that beat and pulsed, washing over us like a smothering wave.

 _~Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!~_

It was like the ugly perversion of the voice of a god - or gods, for the chorus acquired a greater infusion of fresh vocalizations with each successive repetition. The rhythm pounded mercilessly at us, as the surrounding things tightened their trap and sent more tentacles questing our way.

I yelled into the dimness, "We are the servants of Master Shao Kahn! Leave us, or bring his wrath upon yourselves!"

 _~Ia! Ia! Shao Kahn is not here. You are only weak mortals. Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!~_ The cloud over the moon lifted, and we saw the outlines of the shambling horrors.

Ranging in size from seven to twenty feet tall, they were vaguely like trees in silhouette, but they were not trees. Instead of branches, coils of vine-like tendrils oozing foul pus studded them, constantly writhing and rustling. Each thing had four main tentacles as thick as tree trunks near the base, in addition to countless lesser fibrillar appendages. They had no faces and no eyes, only innumerable wide, toothy mouths pockmarking their bodies. The mouths salivated acidic goo, which dripped onto the trampled shrubbery and ate away at it with a hissing sound. Each thing had two, three, or four thick legs, with cloven hooves like a goat's. They took a step forward, their hoofed feet expanding laterally to support their weight.

 _~Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!~_

"What do you want!" I demanded, trying to sound defiant.

 _~Ia! Ia! One of you reeks of Fire. Give him to us, and the rest of you may live. Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!~_

Liu Kang! If they had demanded Jade or Kung Lao, I would have abandoned them for the sake of my mission, but I could not surrender Liu Kang to the things' untender mercies.

 _~Ia! Ia! Die with him, then! Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!~_

The things attacked en masse. Had there been fewer of them, they might have overpowered us more quickly; as it was, there were so many that they got in one another's way. I remember shouting and cutting, the air's discordant shriek as Kung Lao hurled his cabalistic hat, Jade spitting and yowling like an angry cougar. We fought as a team, watching one another's backs, yet we could not protect Liu Kang from an assault that descended from above, among the three of us.

 _~Ia! Ia! I have him!~_

" _No!_ " shouted Kung Lao, as one of the thing's slimy plant-tentacles curled around Liu Kang's abdomen and lifted him high above us, toward its widest mouth. He broke formation with us and flipped forward. In a burst of faintly preternatural energy he changed course in midair, speeding down toward the thing like an arrow let fly. His extended foot sank into the thing's resilient body, causing it no palpable distress. That didn't matter; his primary purpose had not been to attack it, but rather to get close enough to grab Liu Kang's dangling hand and teleport them both away, before the thing's teeth could bite down upon the unconscious monk. Kung Lao's temporary absence left Jade and me that much more exposed to the onslaught. We each were wrestling with thick tentacles clinging to our legs when he rematerialized with Liu Kang. One of the things' hooves kicked Jade in the stomach; she went down to one knee. I was fighting to keep my balance, and losing; once I fell, I knew the things would either seize me or trample me to death. And then it would be only a matter of moments before Kung Lao succumbed. We were outnumbered and outmatched. We had no hope of winning. I had failed the Master...

The Master!

"Master!" I cried above the things' wailing chant. "Help us, your loyal servants! Tell them to stop!"

Kung Lao tried to generate his occult shield, but a snapping appendage tripped him before he could start. One of the things grabbed Liu Kang again. Another unbalanced me completely; a huge, slimy, writhing tentacle effortlessly hoisted me skyward. Yet another tentacle slapped both my arms, forcing me to drop my fans. I had only one more chance before the thing stuffed me into its cavernous maw.

"Master, _TELL THEM!_ " I screeched, forcing as much volume into the desperate plea as I could. At the same time, I snapped one of my throwing daggers into my hand and hurled it at Kung Lao. Its dull hilt smacked him in the chest. If he didn't get the hint this time, then we were all doomed.

Kung Lao roared **"RELEASE MY SERVANTS _NOW!_ "** in that thunderous, nearly perfect impersonation of Master Kahn's voice.

The things froze in place.

 **"YOU _DARE_ TO DEFY MY WILL? YOU ARE _NOTHING_! YOU WILL DIE!"**

 _~Ia! Ia! Shao Kahn? It cannot be!~_

 **"I RULE THIS WORLD! OBEY ME OR _YOU WILL SUFFER!_ "**

The things stepped back. Some of them turned and ran. The tentacles holding Jade and me fell loose. I landed on my hands and knees, although the forest's undergrowth cushioned the impact. Jade executed a perfect aerial flip and alighted upon her feet.

 **"I GIVE YOU _ONE_ WARNING!"** The thing next to me let Liu Kang go; Jade caught him mid-fall and abruptly melted into the forest, carrying him. I sprinted after her, in what I hoped was the direction of the border. Behind me, I heard Kung Lao keeping the blind demon-trees at bay with more bellowed threats. A small part of me hoped that he, too, would get away unscathed, though at the time I couldn't have said why.

After a long and exhausting run, I cleared the forest's outskirts. A short distance away, I glimpsed Jade. Her uniform appeared as silvery-grey as mine in the moonlight. I slowed my pace to a fast walk. It was a credit to my physical conditioning that I felt tired, but not out of breath.

"Have you seen Kung Lao?" I asked, when I was close enough.

Jade shook her head and pointed down at Liu Kang, who lay by her feet.

"Yes, I'll watch him." She dashed toward the border of the Living Forest, covering the distance as fleetly as a gazelle. I'd never seen anyone move that swiftly before, not even Mileena.

"Is everyone in the entire damn Outworld faster than me?" I grumbled.

 **"I'd say so,"** someone else breathed, his words tinged with satire. The long hike and battle with the tree-things must have drained me more than I realized, for I hadn't detected his approach. I drew another pair of fans, ready to battle a tribe of mutants if need be...

Ready to battle anyone if need be...

Where was my antagonist?

 **"I'm right in front of you,"** he whispered, as if reading my mind. **"Trouble is, I'm not terribly visible at this time of day. Or rather, night."**

Whoever confronted me was at least as good as Jade at erasing all sign of his presence, if not more so. I smelled nothing. I felt nothing. When I peered more closely, I could see nothing save shadow. The murky darkness swirled so thickly it blindfolded the eye.

 **"Look. Look again. _See._ "**

The moon's gentle light faintly illuminated the dry, dead earth of the Wasteland, except for one patch directly before me. My eyes traced the outline of what I couldn't view; it was roughly manlike in shape. A man made solely of shadows...

"What do you want?" I curtly demanded.

The man-shadow chuckled. I stared at him so hard that my head began to hurt, and I almost thought I could see different shades of black within the void that composed him. **"What do you think I want?"** he returned, after the pause.

"You cannot have Liu Kang."

 **"Good guess, but incorrect."**

"Have you come to challenge me?"

 **"Do you want to be challenged?"**

"No."

 **"Perhaps another time. Guess again."**

"I've had my fill of insanity today. Stop trying to drive me crazy with your accursed riddles!"

 **"Darn, you guessed."** The man-shadow leaned upon what might have been the shadow of a staff, or conceivably a spear. **"Kitana, do you know that you are the talk of Shokan? Word has spread about your mission. We are all placing bets on how far you will get. You should be proud - the odds of your subduing Liu Kang were five to one against, let alone the odds of bringing him out of the Living Forest alive."**

"Even if what you say is true, how could anyone know I was in the Living Forest?"

 **"You shouldn't underestimate Shao Kahn's power. It isn't wise."**

"I don't understand."

 **"Don't you?"**

"Master Kahn is counting upon me to succeed."

 **"Is he?"**

"Will you cease those redundant tag questions?"

 **"Will I?"**

I seethed and held my tongue, since I doubted that interrogating the man-shadow further would do any good.

 **"Of course,"** he continued, **"the obstacles ahead are much greater. You may get past the Wasteland, but once you enter Shokan..." Was he smiling? I couldn't be sure he had a mouth to smile with. "...let me put it this way: I've wagered that you'll make it inside Shao Kahn's castle, but fail to reach his audience chamber alive."**

"Why are you telling me this?"

The man-shadow dispersed, blending into the shadows of rocks and hills, pooling and becoming nothing but ordinary night.

"Wait!" I called after him. "Who are you? What is your name?"

"You must have some serious problems with your long-term memory," came a familiarly jovial response to my right. "I'm Kung Lao, often called 'the Ingrate.'"

"You be quiet."

"I bet you say that to all the guys."

* * *

Jade had chosen to return to her home within the Living Forest. Kung Lao assured me that she was perfectly safe. Traveling with us had impeded her talent for total concealment, but when she was by herself then not even the demon-trees could detect her presence unless she so wished. I felt a little relieved to hear that, although I couldn't isolate the reason why. Certainly not because I believed all that claptrap about Jade being my "real twin sister." If Jade were my twin sister, then what would that make Mileena? I'd known Mileena for many years; Jade, barely twenty-four hours. Which one did they think I'd trust?

The stretcher we'd carried Liu Kang upon was long since lost. I was ready to shed most of the metal armaments in my cloak and use it like a hammock, but Kung Lao stayed my hand. He took off his hat and pulled a long, deep blue traveler's wrap out of it. The rectangular cloth felt as if it were expertly woven from a substance many times softer and smoother than ordinary wool, but without the sheen of satin or silk. It had one edge decorated with elaborately patterned gold trim. I examined the item, wondering what enchanted fabric it was made of, and spotted a tiny white tag with the arcane words "100% polyester, do not bleach." We wrapped the blanket around Liu Kang.

"That hat of yours must have some potent sorceries cast upon it," I commented, noting that the cloth was far too voluminous to have been physically stored inside his headgear all along. "Wherever did you find it?"

"Inheritance," he shrugged, as if that one word explained everything.

Hoisting Liu Kang in the provisional sling, we used it to take him another two miles away from the Living Forest's border before stopping to rest. I didn't like the thought of sleeping out in the open Wasteland, but the alternative would have been staying near the Living Forest and its demon-tree inhabitants. Kung Lao took first watch, since the initial shift as guard is usually easier than successive shifts, and I suspected I had more experience than he did in such things. During my turn to stand watch, I learned that I was not the only one troubled by nightmares. I doubted Kung Lao would want to talk about his dreams any more than I'd want to talk about mine, though, so when the sun rose I said nothing about the matter.

The day passed without incident, not surprisingly, since most if not all of the Wasteland's mutant humanoids are nocturnal. We'd be at greatest risk of encountering them during the night, which was why we stayed in one place and kept a wary eye out for enemies once darkness fell. The closer we came to Shokan, the more perilous our journey would be. Packs of mutants sometimes prowl the carcass-strewn area near Master Kahn's city, seeking to rob the dead. There isn't truly all that much to rob, but some beings never give up hope. It was early evening during the third day when we approached the irregular rows of bodies at the battlefield's outlying edge. I wanted to feel encouraged that we were nearing the final leg of our journey, yet a nameless worry soured my thoughts. I glanced about the stark lines of mangled corpses, searching for any living enemies that might lurk among the dead, and breathing through my mouth to reduce my exposure to the foul stench of decay.

Kung Lao threw up.

I'd never thought about it before, but he was probably rather young. Scarcely past his second decade, say. He most likely hadn't seen enough bloodshed in his life to become accustomed to it, like I had.

"Are you ready to continue?" I asked, dryly, once he seemed to have finished.

"How can you stand it?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"This!" He vehemently gestured at the rotting cadavers. "Don't you realize what this is? What it means? Every one of these people were cruelly murdered, their remains desecrated. Doesn't that have any effect upon you?"

"They are only criminals."

He lowered the brim of his hat, snarling, "And what do you suppose constitutes a capital crime in Shokan? Littering? Failure to look both ways before crossing the street?" I had never seen him like this before - angry, bitterly sarcastic, mayhap on the verge of forsaking his sanity.

"To oppose the Master is to invite death." I adjusted the clasp of my cloak, ready to use a poison dart on him if necessary.

"'To oppose the Master'?" he parroted, sneering. "My Temple housed forty-five men and twelve boys, none of whom ever harmed a living soul. Liu Kang, _only_ Liu Kang left to 'oppose' Shang Tsung's schemes. And your precious 'Master' sent his butchers to murder them _all_! All except for one, who he invites into his Tournament of fun and games; all except for Liu Kang himself!"

"And you."

"Wrong. Dead wrong." He started pacing again, tensely, like a wild beast held captive within too small a cage. "The only reason they didn't get me as well is that I hid myself and cowered. The sounds followed me, every outcry. I smelled fresh blood, and listened to the desperate, pitiful pleas of the children as they were tortured to death. I heard all their screams again in the Living Forest. It is so well imprinted in my mind that I can see the slaughter as it must have happened; all I have to do is close my eyes!"

"Get to the point."

"Is it that difficult for you to grasp? If your 'Master' had his way, I would have joined the piles of my order's festering corpses - which means that _you_ , dear Princess, would now be a stain on the hillside! _That_ is what the 'Master' you serve would have!"

I snapped two of my fans into my hands and spread them part-way open, crossing my arms in front of my chest. "So, you finally realize what a mistake it was to rescue me from death. Do you wish to rectify your error?"

He stopped pacing, gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. "You really don't understand, do you? What does it take to get something through your pretty head?"

"Try it, and I'll part _your_ head from its shoulders."

"I WASN'T SPEAKING LITERALLY!"

The wind howled, scattering the Wasteland's dust and toying with the hair of a dead woman near my feet. I smelled something on the gust, something other than the putrilage around us, and felt the tread of living feet upon the earth. Kung Lao and I turned our heads slowly in the direction of the disturbance, still keeping careful watch upon one another from the corners of our eyes. A raiding party of approximately twenty mutants studied us with avid interest, from no more than a hundred yards away.

"Oh, shit," we said in unison.

I scanned them for arrows or throwing spears and saw none. Good. At least they couldn't cut us down from afar. I hadn't really expected them to carry any projectiles in the first place; competently crafted missile weapons are a rarity in the Master's realm. Most mutants keep their projectile weapons within their home tribe at all times, reserving them for use only against the greatest threats, such as the Master's wyvern cavalry.

"Quickly," I whispered, "can you take two people with you when you teleport?"

"I don't think so. The magnitude of the required centripetal force would escalate exponentially."

"That is bad?"

"Your arm would be ripped off."

"That is bad." Six mutants, armed with a variety of edged weapons both internal and external, detached themselves from the group and quickly approached us. An excited glow flared in their pupilless crimson eyes. "I'll keep them at bay for as long as I can. Take Liu Kang and go. Use your teleportation to get away."

"No."

"There is no time to argue! One of us must complete the Master's mission!"

"You're breaking my heart."

"I would desert you, if our places were reversed!"

"Good thing they aren't, isn't it?"

There was no more time to debate, for the walking death would soon be upon us.

Kung Lao hurled his bladed hat. I palmed my fans and scattered my spiked caltrops in their path. That slowed their approach enough for me to carefully aim and throw my two remaining nightshade darts, striking the mutant closest to me precisely in the right eye and the one just beside him in the throat. Nightshade does not kill humans or mutants instantly, even in large doses. It did buy me time, though, as the poisoned mutants stumbled and their fellows had to step around them. There was the _ching_ sound of metal deflecting metal; one of the attackers must have blocked Kung Lao's hat. I was tempted to use my last sleeping-sap dart, yet refrained on account of a deep inner suspicion that I could not put into words.

A grinning attacker with a long knife shoved his dying comrade to the side and charged me. When he was nearly upon me, I reached forward and bent back, underneath his furious swipe at my throat. My hands seized the soft part of his body below the ribs and above the pelvis bones. Speed, fluidity, and balance were everything. I arched my back and pushed with the muscles of the legs, bringing him forward without exerting the vast effort it would have required to raise his center of gravity. He hurtled over me, and I smoothed my own motion into a quick back handspring.

I recovered from the move just in time to crouch and meet my next opponent with a kick to his knee. Luck was with me; he had planted his foot in front of a rock firmly anchored in the ground, and his leg was already in the process of extending. My strike pushed his knee back while the bulk of his impetus went forward and his foot stayed in place; something had to give, and it was his joint. His knee hyper-extended, its hinge cracking with a faint snapping sound; his leg awkwardly contorted in an angle it was never meant to bend. I rolled to the side as the crippled mutant, no longer capable of standing, pitched forward. His flailing arm and the blade that extended from it slashed at me, cutting into my left thigh. I held back a curse, turned, and stepped on the flat of his blade, pinning him face down long enough to draw my fan across the back of his neck, severing his spine.

Kung Lao's two opponents circled him. Just as I turned to help him against his attackers, they both lunged for him; one raised her rusty machete high and chopped down with it, while the other moved to plant a dagger in his back. Kung Lao ducked and spontaneously vanished an instant before the machete could touch his head. The mutant with the dagger barely missed the middle of his back, instead scoring a gash across his left scapula. Both attackers lost their balance and stumbled forward when their strikes didn't encounter the resistance they expected. The one with the machete could not stop her blade from burying itself in her colleague's braincase. Before she could extract her weapon from the body, Kung Lao rematerialized behind her and planted his hands on her hair, grasping it firmly and flipping over her. As he touched down in front of her, still holding her hair, he used his momentum to propel her over his head. She lost her grip upon the machete, which remained stuck within her associate's corpse.

The poisoned mutants went into their final convulsions; they had never managed to crawl close enough to provide any serious threat. Kung Lao and I glared at the two mutant survivors of the fracas. The disarmed female surveyed us for half a second, then sprinted in the direction from which she had come. Her comrade stared at us for a little longer. Then he started to back away, finally turning around running. I spread my bloody fan and displayed it for the scouting party to see. Kung Lao held up his hat, letting the last dying rays of sunlight reflect brightly upon its jagged metal brim.

The mutants milled around a little, then decided not to bother with us after all. They shambled away, neither hurrying nor delaying, although some of them looked over their shoulders and fixed us with their hate-filled, evil red eyes. I saw the finger-shaped mark tattooed on their foreheads and wondered why I hadn't noticed it before. They were from the Clan of the Severed Finger, one of the tribes that was supposedly loyal to the Master. They knew damn well who I was and who I worked for, yet they had attacked anyway. I planned to mention this outrage when I delivered my mission report to Master Kahn.

I checked on Liu Kang. He was uninjured; the Severed Finger had probably mistaken him for nothing more than another corpse. Kung Lao kept his gaze firmly fixed upon the Severed Finger until they disappeared from view, behind the grisly pattern of impaled bodies and a dip in the land.

"Don't get any ideas," I advised him. "They could have taken us. They could have consumed us like a school of piranha driven into a feeding frenzy. They just didn't want to pay the price we would have made them pay."

* * *

 _You killed me._

 _My Princess, you killed me._

 _You kill us all!_

The gathering of walking corpses jeered derisive accusations. In the center of their ring, I relived the struggle with the six attacking mutants. Only this time, I was on my own. I took two of the mutants down with my nightshade darts, and a third with my sleeping-sap dart, but the other three circled me and I was unable to defend against them all. My hands burned; the slash in my thigh throbbed; and I anticipated the cold caress of a knife in my back. Determined to take as many of them down with me as I could, I pitched headlong toward one of the attackers, cutting her down - and heard the muted thud of two more bodies falling upon the dusty earth.

I turned around and met the sky-blue eyes of my rescuer. His golden-blond hair shined with light reflected from an unseen source. He was quite tall and strong; a warrior, most assuredly. Flickering shadows hid his face. I did not have to see it to know that he was definitely not Kung Lao. He still felt familiar, in a manner I could not describe.

The ring of zombies murmured ill-tempered protests. _Hey, back off!_ he snarled to them, and surprisingly, they did take a few steps backward.

To me, _You really shouldn't let them get to you like that. They're only a threat if you allow them to be._ His voice was also different from Kung Lao's; it flowed slowly, like thick syrup. He crossed the distance between us in a few strides and put his hands on my shoulders, affectionately. _You know what your problem is? You care too much. They can't affect you if you don't care. Feel nothing, and nothing can ever hurt you._

 _I don't understand._

 _You will, in time._ He ran his fingers through my long black hair. _I'll show you. How about it?_

 _I... all right. What must I do?_

 _First, conquer your fears and take off that mask. Why are you so afraid to show your face? Nearly everyone in the Outworld knows who you are._

I hesitantly tugged at it. _I wear my mask on Master Kahn's orders. He has warned me never to remove it unless absolutely necessary. He said I should never be... near anyone else when I removed it._ My fingers were trembling; I was all but overcome with nervousness. A small voice within me cried not to do it, not to circumvent the Master's will even in this one, seemingly harmless way. My itching hands halted in place after I brought the mask halfway down; the golden-haired man gently put his hands around mine and helped me remove it completely.

 _Shao Kahn doesn't know what he's talking about. The only thing your mask hides is a very beautiful face. Why don't you come a little closer?_ A part of me dearly wanted to do as he asked. I felt a strong attraction to him. A keen pit of loneliness gnawed my heart. It had been there all along, I realized; for years and years, its caustic bite had eaten away at me, shutting my soul within walls of stone. Only now, it receded a little. Perhaps, if I clung tightly to this strange person, the emptiness would subside, and I would no longer be as miserable as I knew I had always been. He bent his head down, bringing his lips close to mine, and I met his kiss passionately.

Something was wrong.

His hands slackened and his arms fell away from me. I broke off the kiss and stepped back, apprehensive. Before I could ask anything, I saw the nature of the wrongness - an expanding sphere of pressure pushed outward from the center of his vitals. His body stretched and distended past the tensile limits of his skin, which rent apart at bloody seams. He uttered a strangled cry before the growing stress within him ripped him apart, like a balloon filled with too much air. I threw my hands in front of me, and his blood and organs spattered upon them, were absorbed by my thirsty silken gloves, and soaked through onto my skin. The sear upon my fingers and palms raged, so painfully intense that I could not bear it. The circle of corpses whooped their approval and moved in on me, a voracious light shining in their glazed, dead eyes.

I screamed.

-or tried to scream, but something pressed tightly against my mouth, stifling the shriek before it could finish taking shape.

"Easy! It's only me," Kung Lao soothed. "We're still in mutant territory. You mustn't cry out, or who knows what will hear you. All right?" I managed a nod. He removed his hand from my mouth.

The dream had been so vivid! As lifelike as the day it... I started to push the half-formed thought away, then stopped and shook with horror when I saw my face mask clutched in my hand. I must have pulled it off during the nightmare. Another wave of shuddering revulsion washed over me; I hunched over and trembled, unable to fight the fear and loathing off. And my hands were filthy with blood; I could feel the rot eating away at them even now.

"Take it easy," consoled Kung Lao. "You're safe - er, that is, about as safe as you can be in a former battlefield full of corpses and roving mutants, which isn't really all that safe, but there's no danger right now. I think. Just relax..." When I didn't answer or stop shaking, he shifted position, moving into my line of sight, and leaned forward. His face was perhaps twelve inches away from mine. "Is there anything I can-"

 _"Not so close!"_ I swung my elbow at him and struck him in the cheek. His head snapped back and he hit the ground. With a slight groan, he rolled to his knees, holding the injured side of his face. A brackish trickle of liquid showed near the corner of his mouth.

"My apologies," he muttered, then turned and moved away, adjusting the front of his hat down and grumbling something sardonic in Mandarin. Most of it was too low for me to make out, though I thought I discerned the phrase "...this happens too damn often..."

"Wait."

"Hm."

"Raiden didn't tell you everything about me, did he?" I inferred, cautiously.

"Even the gods do not see 'everything.' Only a God could do that," he sighed, clearly pronouncing the capital letter in his second sentence.

"I take it that means 'yes.'" Putting my mask back on, I drew in a long, slow breath and exhaled it, letting my tightly constricted muscles unwind, one by one. "I am under a... condition of Master Kahn's will. He has warned me never to remove my mask, or if I did, never to let anyone come too close to me."

"Hm?"

"Once, I disregarded the Master's wishes. I let someone come near me. His name was Lucian." I looked down at my prickling hands. "He died. Horribly."

"Oh."

"I don't know how much it takes. A kiss was enough to set it off. Maybe less. Maybe just being in proximity to me when my mask is down."

He should have been accusatory, fearful, or angry, but strangely even his former vestiges of pique had faded away, replaced by an inexplicable expression of sympathy. "I appreciate your telling me this. I thought I'd offended you somehow... why are you looking at me like that?"

"I could have killed you, easily. It wouldn't have taken much."

He lifted the brim of his hat up a little, enough for the moonlight to shine upon his face. "What you say is true, but that was not your intent and it is not your fault you are under a curse. I fail to see your point."

"Don't you care about your own life?"

"Does it matter?" he returned, without missing a beat. "Yes, I care. When has that ever made a difference?"

I looked back down at my sticky, filthy hands. Unable to bear the sensation any longer, I tore my gloves off and reached for my spare flask of water. Splashing its moisture on my hands, I tried to scour them clean with a coarse brush I'd taken from Jade's home.

"Kitana..."

"There is blood on my hands," I said, without looking up. "I have to get it off."

"It is not your fault Lucian died."

"Yes, it is. I should have obeyed the Master. If only I'd obeyed him!"

"Shao Kahn never flat-out told you that he'd cursed you with the cliche 'kiss of death,' did he? How were you to know?" A moment later, "Um, not to intrude, but if you want to clean blood off your hands then what you're doing looks pretty counterproductive."

He was right. My scrubbing had been so harsh that I'd opened several small cuts in the skin. Pinpricks of fresh blood oozed through them. A heavy pallor of despair settled upon me, and I let the flask and the brush fall through my blighted fingers. "I- I'll never get it off..."

"You can't change the past. Only the present."

"What does the past have to do with anything?"

"Maybe nothing. Maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about."

My eyes fluttered shut.

"Or, maybe there is something you could do that would help you feel better."

My eyes snapped back open. "Tell me."

He did so. When he finished, I furrowed my brow curiously and asked, "What makes you think I could or would do this?"

"Perhaps you can't. Perhaps you won't."

"I'll think about it." A glance at the moon confirmed that my shift at watch wouldn't begin for another hour, yet I sincerely did not want to attempt sleeping again. "Kung Lao... did Raiden tell you anything about my sister, Mileena?"

"Yes. Would you like to hear what he said?"

I nodded and listened carefully to the things he told me. They were so strange that I wasn't sure I believed a word of them, but I listened. I thought about all of it during my entire shift at watch. Kung Lao's claims seemed to explain so much... why I'd never seen Mileena with her mask down, why her voice felt so wrong, why I had glimpsed her and Baraka together that one day. But then, there were other plausible explanations, any of which could be equally valid. Mileena was my sister. She had always been my sister. When dawn finally came, I told myself softly, "None of it can possibly be true."

"Why not?" asked Kung Lao, startling me.

"Where did you learn to simulate the breathing of a sleeping person?"

"Oh come now, Kitana, I must have _some_ secrets."

* * *

When nighttime descended once more, we could see the outer gates of Shokan. I told Kung Lao to halt for a spell. "You have said that you want to enter the Master's Tournament, am I correct?"

"Yes."

"I shall present you to him, along with Liu Kang. This is my territory. You _must_ do as I say; if you do not, then Shokan's residents might mistake you for a common outsider and turn upon you before you cross the first street."

"So, am I supposed to be an 'uncommon outsider'?"

"In a manner of speaking. You must be an outsider specifically in my charge, under my protection and therefore under the Master's protection. If you disagree, if you do not go along with what I say, then I will not be able to intervene when a dozen of the Master's mercenaries decide to dismember you for sport."

"Charming place, this city of Shokan."

"If anyone accosts you, you may be tempted to fight back. Don't. Taking any action against a citizen of Shokan, even in self-defense, will void the Master's protection. You must trust me to enforce that protection. If you don't like that, then I recommend you return to the Mother Realm." He snorted contemptuously. I'd only said that last bit to annoy him, anyway. "We must bind Liu Kang with this cord before we proceed," I instructed, withdrawing the item from my cloak. "It is enchanted. It cannot be cut or damaged by anything save hellfire."

"Is that drug of yours going to wear off soon?"

"No, not for another day. That is not the point. If Liu Kang is not completely restrained, Adjutant General Kintaro may become suspicious. Kintaro monitors the flow of traffic to and from Shokan, ever since that outsider with the partly-metal face tried to escape. We do _not_ want to make Kintaro suspicious." Kung Lao supported Liu Kang as I tied the unconscious monk's feet together at the ankles, and his hands behind his back. "You can put that cloth of yours back into your hat. We won't be using it to transport Liu Kang anymore; you must carry him by yourself."

"May I ask why?"

"Here, yes. Once we are in the city, do not speak unless spoken to. And the reason why you must carry Liu Kang alone is that it would appear strange if I were to help you. The higher in rank a servant of the Master is, the less he or she is expected to assist inferiors. I am the Master's Left Hand; you are an outsider. Your status is absolutely inferior to that of everyone else. Inferiors are always expected to be completely subservient. If you have any other questions, now is the time to ask them."

"Yes. Is everyone in Shokan into this bondage-submission thing?"

"Don't try to be funny."

"I don't get to do that either, hm?"

"Just follow me, and for the Master's sake, keep your wits about you."

The hooded guards near the outer gate stepped aside to let us pass. I risked a quick glance behind me, to see how Kung Lao was doing. His hat was down so low that its shadow reached his chin. He did not look to either side as he plodded forward, with the unconscious monk slung over his left shoulder. The guards watched him carefully. I noticed that he'd wrapped his traveler's sash around himself, like a one-piece robe of sorts, hiding the scarlet character on his garments. Good idea, I thought. The last thing either of us needed was for his outlandish garb to attract unwanted attention.

I set foot upon the network of long, thin bridges that cross the chasm between Shokan's gates and the city proper. Faint lights spaced along their edges illuminated my path, in addition to the glow of the rising moon. I walked slowly and carefully; the bridges had no safety rails, and to fall off would mean plummeting a few hundred feet to one's death on the hard stone below. There was a scattering of bodies in the pit beneath the bridge, evidence of fools who had not been careful enough when they crossed. By the Master's decree, their corpses lay where they had fallen, as a warning to others who would cross the bridge without taking due caution.

The network of bridges led to a flat expanse, divided by Shokan's inner wall. General Kintaro waited before the second gate.

Like the late Goro, Kintaro is one of the four-armed human-dragon hybrids who dominate Kuatan, the fourth Astral Plane. They tower over mere mortals. Their lifespans stretch for millennia. Their strength is so great that the weakest of them can break the neck of an ox with his bare, two-fingered hands. They possess an uncanny resistance to sorcery; they're capable of shrugging off magical blasts that would disintegrate lesser beings. If enraged, they can use their massive weight to crush their prey, or spit globules of searing fire. They acknowledge no overlord save Master Kahn himself. The scions of Kuatan rarely regard mortals not under the Master's protection as anything other than an annoyance or food. And Kintaro is arguably Kuatan's mightiest warrior.

Kintaro's unique coloration sets him apart from the rest of his kind. The front of his body and limbs is pure white; his back is deep orange and patterned with black stripes. His eyes glow yellow, and have vertically slitted black pupils. Some suspect that Kintaro looks different from his yellowish-brown skinned, red-eyed kindred because he is part tiger in ancestry, as well as part human and part dragon. No one has ever asked him directly and lived to relate his answer, though.

Kintaro uses no weapons, and needs none. His hide is so tough that he has little use for armor; all he typically wears is a loincloth, spiked shoulder pads, ridged knee pads, and four studded war bracelets. This is Adjutant General Kintaro - slayer of dragons, destroyer of cities, and ruler of Shokan's armies. Rumor had it that he would participate in the Master's Tournament, and that anyone who sought to challenge Master Kahn must first defeat Kintaro. If so, then Kung Lao and Liu Kang were surely doomed. Not that it mattered to me one way or the other. All I cared about was the fulfillment of my mission... or so I kept telling myself.

I approached Kintaro and bowed, then snapped my fingers at Kung Lao. He gently set Liu Kang down and also bowed, very low indeed.

"O General Kintaro, please grant us, the Master's humble supplicants, your leave to enter Shokan," I beseeched.

"Ah, Kitana. I have heard of your mission." I shall never get used to hearing Kintaro's deep bass but otherwise unremarkable speaking voice. He is a being of supernatural power, yet he sounds like someone I might find repairing shoes in Shokan's market square. "You were charged with retrieving the warrior Liu Kang; I see that you have succeeded. Who is this other mortal that accompanies you?"

"He is-"

"Yes, 'sister,'" interrupted another, stepping around great Kintaro, "do tell us. Who _is_ your new boyfriend?"

Mileena!

She twirled her paired sai and regarded me with disdain.

Her eyes carried an especially cruel glint. "You try my patience," I warned her, as she lazily strolled past me.

" _I_ try _your_ patience? That is a new one. You are always giving me your silly orders. 'Mileena, don't waste time putting out her eyes.' 'Mileena, they won't make good slaves if their arms are broken.' 'Mileena, if you disembowel him then you'd better clean up the mess.' You can be so _very_ tedious at times." She kneeled next to where Liu Kang lay and brushed his hair away from his face, nodding. Then she moved toward Kung Lao. She stopped directly in front of him, put the tip of one sai underneath his chin, and used it to force his head upward until she could see his face despite the shadow of his hat. "Mmm. They're both pretty cute. Can I have them?"

"No!" I snapped. Kung Lao gave Mileena the same blank, empty stare that I had seen another person use as a psychological defense barely ten days ago.

"Come now, dear 'sister.' You owe me. Didn't I leave those other two alone, specifically at your request?"

"I am on a mission for Master Kahn. These outsiders are under his protection."

"Oh, I suppose the one with the headband is, if you want to be technical." She lasciviously riffled her fingers through Kung Lao's wavy black hair, then drew them across his cheek and under his chin. "But the Master never said anything about this one."

"He is to enter Master Kahn's Tournament. This is your last warning - leave him alone!"

"Or what?"

"Or I'll make you."

"Perhaps," she sneered, "that's what I want."

I drew my fans and started to take a step forward-

"Halt, both of you!" Kintaro snarled. Mileena took her sai away from Kung Lao's throat. I lowered my fans. "I do not know what rivalry there is between you, and I do not care. Kitana, you _will_ enter Shokan and present your charges to Shao Kahn. Mileena, you _will_ let her and her associates pass. Is that clear?"

"I told the old bat it wouldn't work," Mileena pouted, sulking.

I put my fans inside my cloak and bowed to Kintaro again. "Thank you." Kung Lao also bowed, then picked up Liu Kang's motionless body.

Kintaro nodded. "Go. Now."

We went.

Mileena conspicuously trailed us into the city. Under any other circumstances, I might have let her follow me to her heart's content, but I was contemplating something that could best be done without her interference. I motioned for Kung Lao to get behind me, drew my fans, and shifted into a defensive stance, preparing for the inevitable confrontation. Mileena slowly ambled toward me, spinning her sai in an elaborately continuous motion every step of the way. Her weapons looked like heavy, clumsy objects, yet she wielded them with frightening dexterity.

When she was close enough, she asked, "I suppose this means you won't surrender either of your slaves to me?"

"Yes, it does. No, I won't."

"They are only troublemakers. Since when do you care about the fate of criminals?" I did not answer. "You have changed, Kitana. You have allowed your eyes to become clouded. Remember what your profession is. Remember how we serve the Master! Killing people in cold blood is not only our privilege, it is our first and foremost duty!"

"Oh? Would you murder _anyone_ , then, if Master Kahn were to order it?" I worked to keep the retort low and even.

"Yes."

"Even your consort, Baraka?"

Mileena's grip on her sai tightened, and her gaze cooled to an icy glare of pure hostility. "How did you know he is my...?"

"I didn't. Now I do."

"Then you had better forget, and swiftly."

"You are dodging the question." I hate it when she looks at me like that; I feel as if I am trapped within a glacier, and slowly succumbing to hypothermia.

"You already know what the answer is," she hissed, horribly. "We are assassins. We cannot allow ourselves to love others. It would be too painful. Remember that, 'sister!'" She crossed her sai in front of herself and disappeared, altering her position in space with her own style of teleportational sorcery.

"I think I'll sue her for sexual harassment," Kung Lao muttered.

"Perhaps you did not hear me the first time," I barked, turning upon him. "You will _not_ speak again unless spoken to!"

He adjusted the brim of his hat a shade lower still, and wisely made no reply.

* * *

The Arena lay directly ahead. My inner doubts gnawed deeper with every step I took. I felt that I should not waste my time here, that I should go directly to the Master's castle instead.

 _Come now, dear 'sister.' You owe me. Didn't I leave those other two alone, specifically at your request?_

No, I could not put this off. If I were to wait, then Mileena might wreak her vengeance on the helpless captives in the meantime, just to spite me. It would be within her character. I entered the Arena, which was fortuitously deserted except for the two prisoners and their armed guards. I cleared my throat and addressed the Master's black-hooded foot soldiers.

"Attention! I request an audience alone with the prisoners. You will stand outside of the Arena's doors until I call for you to return." They seemed a bit puzzled, and reluctant to follow the order.

I drew one of my fans and spread it part way open. "I am Kitana, the Master's Left Hand. To defy me is to defy him." Pointing the fan's edge at them, I added, "If you falter in you duty to the Master, then you _and_ your families will pay the price. None shall be spared. He does not tolerate disobedience, and neither shall I. Leave, now, or face the consequences!"

They filed out, still appearing confused. My eyebrows descended; it shouldn't have taken that extra threat to compel their obedience. I didn't like it, but there was no time to brood about the matter. I briskly walked past the male prisoner to where the female prisoner was shackled.

"Hey, Kitana baby!" the man leered. "Who's your new boyfriend?"

Without turning his head, Kung Lao removed his hat and cast it at the man. The item veered at an angle, so that the flat of its spinning metal brim connected solidly with the man's forehead. He groaned and collapsed in place.

The female prisoner smiled, a little. The expression vanished from her face once I was directly across from her, replaced by that vacant, sepulchral look I had seen her wear before.

"Lieutenant Sonya Blade?" I queried. She made no response. I proffered a small brass key. "Take this. It will unlock your chains." She stared at the item as if it were a poisonous serpent. "Go on, try it." Her blue-grey eyes searched my masked face for a long time.

"Why?" Her question was creaky, uncertain, and very quiet. It was almost certainly the first thing she'd said in days.

"He tells me that you are a warrior good and true, dedicated to the light," I explained, gesturing in Kung Lao's direction. "I do not know about that. What I do know is that you have not only served Master Kahn, you have died doing it. You've earned this."

She took the item gingerly, still acting as if she expected it to bite her. It was somewhat difficult for her to fit the key in the right-hand manacle's lock, since the short reach of her chains forced her arms to be spread apart. With patience and deftness, she used one hand to work the key in and turn it. An expression of incredulity appeared upon her face when her manacle came off with an audible clink. She unlocked her left-hand manacle and rubbed her sore wrists in amazement.

"Keep the key on your person," I advised her. "You'll have to put your manacles back on before your guards return. I am sorry, but it is impossible for you to depart at this time. Since your comrade attempted escape-"

"His name is Kano, and he is not my comrade."

"Since Kano attempted escape, Master Kahn has doubled the guards around this area, and assigned Adjutant General Kintaro to watch over Shokan's only exit. Do you know who Kintaro is?" She nodded. "Then you know that you cannot get past him by yourself."

Her head drooped.

"Don't lose hope," I urged. "Your time will come. Master Kahn is going to hold a grand Tournament; Kintaro will participate in it. Wait for the proper moment, when everyone is distracted. You won't necessarily be alone. I am told that someone is in search of you... what was his name? 'Jack'...?"

"Jax?"

"Yes, that sounds right. He has followed your magic beacon-"

"Distress signal."

"-he has followed it here to the Outworld. I think he may enter the Master's Tournament. Watch for him... and above all, be careful. Mileena seems to have taken a dislike to you."

"You don't say."

"If she tries to mistreat you again, well, at least you'll have a fighting chance. Incidentally, that skeleton key will also unlock Kano's chains. He has not served the Master in any way, so I leave his fate up to you. And now I must send your guards back in; if I leave them waiting outside for too long, they may become suspicious."

"I think they are already suspicious. You have been generous to me, Kitana. I will warn you - I've heard great deal of gossip about you, these past few weeks. There have been rumors that you are falling into Shao Kahn's disfavor."

My fan slipped through my fingers and flapped on the stone slab that supported her concrete pedestal. "That cannot be."

"All I know is what I hear."

"I've toiled to complete one of the toughest missions he has ever assigned! How can he-"

"Kitana?" She waved her hand in front of my eyes to bring me out of my reverie. "Here." She held forth a pair of smooth, metallic wristlets. "Put these on. I suspect you'll need them more than I will."

"What are...?"

"I already have my own pair, and Jax will undoubtedly be wearing his. This is a spare set, which you may keep. Wear them underneath your gloves, so no one suspects; a light covering of thin fabric won't hamper their properties."

"How do I tap into their sorcery?"

"They're not sorcery, they're the cutting edge of highly experimental military technology. The left one, project Icarus, induces a self-contained gravitational field with a maximum acceleration magnitude of twenty meters per second per second; the right one, project Heracles, can extrude electromagnetic pressure waves with a cyclical amplitude of fifteen thousand Newtons."

"Sorcery," I agreed.

She sighed, described their magical effects in laymen's terms, and showed me how to activate them. "I recommend that you not use them unless absolutely necessary. This particular pair hasn't been field tested. I never had the chance to try them out, so I'm not completely sure they will work properly. They might backfire. For your sake, I hope they don't."

I fitted the magic bracelets around my wrists and retrieved my fan. Sonya refastened her manacles and slipped their key inside her right sock. "Good luck," she said, with a slightly broader smile than before.

"The same to you." I transferred my attention to Kung Lao, who was flipping through a small book next to Kano's pedestal. "What is that?"

"Hm? Oh, just a chronicle, of sorts. Fascinating. I wondered whose bloodstains those were, near the Portal..."

"Are you ready to leave?"

"At once." He made the book disappear inside his hat, put the article back on, and picked up Liu Kang. "Next stop, Buckingham Palace."

* * *

The Master's castle was not the same.

As I approached the hooded guards at the entrance, I instructed their chief to notify the Master of my return. He fidgeted a little and said, "Master Kahn is expecting you." Mildly surprised, I proceeded directly toward the Master's throne room and audience chamber. Kung Lao followed. We progressed unhindered through rooms carpeted with plush velvet, up spiraling stairways of gleaming black obsidian, and along marble balconies garnished with elaborately worked gold rails. I examined my surroundings warily, trying to pinpoint the dissimilarity that churned my stomach and raised goose flesh on my skin.

I had come home, and I was afraid, and I didn't know why.

The guards to Master Kahn's anteroom stepped back and opened the doors. Looking through them, I finally descried what seemed so different - the Master's sorcerous ceiling lights were dimmer than usual. The open archway at the antechamber's other end was completely dark. I cast a quick backward glance at Kung Lao and Liu Kang, just to reassure myself that they were still there, and entered. The click of Kung Lao's shoes echoed upon the antechamber's white marble floor and walls. The Master's audience chamber lay just beyond.

"Well, well, Kitana. I am genuinely amazed. The odds that you would get this far were astronomical. I lost a fair parcel of money betting in your disfavor. Although I do intend to win it all back."

Directly in front of me was a hooded, mantled figure dressed almost as strangely as Kung Lao. Underneath the gold-trimmed folds of his blue-black cloak, the hooded one wore a divided vest colored canary yellow. A thick black stripe ran vertically along each half of the vest. A matching yellow belt encircled his waist, supporting a tightly gathered pair of black leather slacks. His yellow socks and wristbands along with a pair of flat black shoes completed the bizarre ensemble. The overall effect was so distracting that I nearly didn't recognize-

 _"Shang Tsung!"_ Liu Kang's high-pitched screech threatened to shatter my eardrums.

"Sleeping Beauty awakes," the sorcerer drolly observed.

I had underestimated the monk. My sleeping-sap would keep an ordinary person unconscious for a week... but long after the fact it dawned upon me that Liu Kang was hardly "ordinary," in any sense of the word. The voice of his nemesis must have roused him from his slumber.

"What's wrong, you cowardly maggot?" Liu Kang taunted. "Too scared to show your face even when both my arms are tied behind my back?"

Shang Tsung drew back the hood of his sleeveless cloak, revealing a black skullcap stretched across the top of his head. I sensed the presence of others in the darkness beyond him. Kung Lao set Liu Kang on his feet and whispered a warning to him in Mandarin, to the effect that if Liu Kang tried to change shape the unbreakable cord would fatally constrict him. Liu Kang's reply was unprintable. I tuned both of them out and concentrated on the sorcerer, who obstructed the relatively narrow entrance to the Master's throne room. "Shang Tsung, please do me the courtesy of announcing my arrival to Master Kahn. I have completed his mission."

"Oh, Shao Kahn knows you're here," replied the shape-changing sorcerer. "It is I who finds your visit such an unexpected surprise. May I have just a brief word with you before you proceed?"

"You are neither unexpectant nor surprised. You may dispense with the lying; you're much worse at it than I am."

His face contorted into a vitriolic expression. "So much for pleasantries. Very well, I'll not waste another second of your precious time." He snapped his fingers, and two beings detached themselves from the shadows to stand at his either side... Baraka and Mileena. "Hand Liu Kang over to me at once."

"Why don't you come and get me?" smirked the monk. "Oh, that's right - last time, you couldn't run away fast enough!"

Baraka unsheathed the blades in his arms and crossed them in front of himself. Mileena readied her paired sai. Shang Tsung rubbed his hands together as he fixed his attention upon Liu Kang. "You have no idea what tortures I have in store for you. I shall hear you beg for mercy before I take your soul!"

"Now I know," interjected Kung Lao, in a sadly bittersweet tone.

All eyes focused on him.

"Ever since I was old enough to ask the question, I have wondered why. Why did my ancestor spare your life? Why didn't he destroy you when he had the chance? Now I know. He pitied you. I pity you too, you poor, wretched, miserable thing." He unwrapped his one-piece traveler's cloth and cast it aside, exposing the scarlet character emblazoned on his attire. "And your mother dresses you funny."

Shang Tsung's neck stiffened. "Who are you to talk?"

"Kung Lao, last of my line."

"Just checking. REPTILE!" shrieked the sorcerer. " _Kill him!_ KILL HIM THIS INSTANT!"

Kung Lao braced himself for an assault that never came.

"Reptile?" repeated the sorcerer, sounding baffled. He looked over his shoulder, muttering "...damned invisible lizard is never around when I need him..." I took advantage of Shang Tsung's distraction to throw a fan at his neck. Baraka chopped with his left blade, slicing the fan in twain before it touched the sorcerer. Its pieces fluttered to the ground.

I _really_ hate it when my opponents are faster than me.

Shang Tsung turned back, saw what had happened, and channeled a blast of sorcerous energy at me. I perceived an effulgent skull surrounded with hellish flames a split-second before I dodged to the right. Kung Lao sidestepped to the left. Liu Kang did not move in time to escape the livid surge of necromantic energy. It hit him square-on, knocking him clean across the room.

"Brother!" Kung Lao called, whirling in Liu Kang's direction. Shang Tsung's body changed size and color as the shape-shifter assumed the form of the mortal Kano. Kano-Tsung drew a knife from his tunic and cocked his arm, preparing to heave the weapon at Kung Lao's unprotected back-

-and let the blade fall through his fingers. It clattered noisily upon the floor.

I followed his line of sight and caught my breath. I should have realized that this would happen. Nothing could have damaged the cord that bound Liu Kang, save hellfire. Liu Kang had been directly in the path of Shang Tsung's hellfire. Which meant...

 **"FREE!"** roared the dragon.

"Oh, shit," gasped Kano-Tsung.

Chaos broke loose.

Kano-Tsung tried to flee through the archway to the Master's throne room, but a contingent of hooded guards had somehow appeared there, blocking the exit. Master Kahn's distinctive, booming chuckle resonated about us all. Kano-Tsung flung open his arms and, in a small explosion of preternatural energy, transformed into the image of General Kintaro. The dragon advanced upon Kintaro-Tsung, a murderous light blazing in its yellow eyes. Baraka charged toward Kung Lao.

I am reconstructing all this as best I can from fragmented memory, because I didn't have time to pay overmuch attention to any of these events when they happened. I was too preoccupied with Mileena, who used her space-distorting powers to disappear and then reappear six feet over my head. She kicked down at my collarbone, dislocating it.

"Baraka make Kung Lao scream!"

"RRRRAAARGH!"

 **"SHANG TSUNG, YOU WILL BURN!"**

"You should have given those two to me when you had the opportunity, 'sister,'" Mileena chastised. "Now I have to kill you again. It's your own fault. You should have known better." She thrust at me with the sai in her left hand. I barely parried it in time with my fan. She cut at my throat with her other sai. I blocked it with the outer side of my upraised left arm; her weapon drew a bloody trail across my skin. Her knee struck me in the solar plexus and I fought the urge to double over. Instead, I forced myself to spring backward, tucking my chin in and hugging my knees against my chest, somersaulting in midair.

A vapor of quintessential coldness enveloped me. It coated my skin, dulling my muscles and sapping my strength. My arms lost their tight lock upon my knees and my acrobatic discipline faltered. I landed on my back, reinjuring old contusions.

Mileena's sai rematerialized in her hands, still gleaming faint blue from her icy sorcery. "I don't know why you put up a fight at all. You don't have a chance. I'm faster than you. I'll always be faster than you." She approached, drawing her gloved fingertips along the sai that had cut me, wiping my blood off it. "Don't worry, 'sister;' I'll be merciful. I won't make you suffer." She plunged her weapon downward, aiming for my heart.

I grabbed her descending arm with both hands and wrenched it toward me, overbalancing her. At the same time I kicked up with both legs, planting them in the soft cavity beneath her ribs. Ignoring the pain in my arm, collar, and spine, I used all the strength in my four limbs to send her over my head and into the marble wall behind me.

The dragon roared.

Kintaro-Tsung spat an incendiary globule.

Kung Lao's thrown hat rebounded off Baraka's swordblade.

Mileena shrieked a wordless outcry of hatred and loathing. By the time I shakily rolled to my knees, she had completely recovered her footing. "I tried to be nice, 'sister.' Now it's personal." The temperature of the air dropped a few degrees, and her sai glowed blue. I crossed my arms in front of me, preparing to guard against her wintry sorcery. She surprised me by pivoting ninety degrees before casting her icy spell. I followed its path and trembled in panic when I saw where it was headed. Across from us, Kung Lao was slowly retreating from Baraka's furious onslaught. His left hand carried the knife that Kano-Tsung had dropped; he was using the weapon to parry one of Baraka's wild swings to his head.

"Look out!" I cried, but I was not fast enough. I have never been fast enough.

Kung Lao never saw the frigid blast that hit him in the back, shoving him with irresistible force toward the grinning mutant. Baraka thrust with the swordblades in his arms, driving them through Kung Lao's chest. The crimson-tipped points of the blades protruded through his back. He shuddered and dropped the knife. Baraka viciously twisted the blades and breathed, "Scream, little man. Scream!"

"You _bitch_!" I howled, recklessly charging Mileena. She cracked the hilt of her sai across my forehead, knocking me down in mid-lunge. The thump of my body hitting the floor seemed to come from a long way away.

"I wondered if that mortal meant anything to you," she mused. "Perhaps I'll keep you alive long enough to watch his dying agonies before I torture and kill you." My head fell to the side. I wanted to shut my eyes rather than look at the horrible spectacle in front of them, but couldn't; some morbid compulsion kept them open.

"Why no scream?" Baraka grunted, bringing the swords down and across Kung Lao's body in a half-circle pattern of evisceration. Kung Lao remained eerily silent. At last I could squeeze my eyes shut, and when I did I felt a strange moisture in them that was neither water nor blood.

Baraka's grating, inhuman voice pierced through my self-imposed blindness. "What must Baraka do to make Kung Lao screEEEAAAAAAGH-!"

" _No!_ " shouted Mileena. It was the first time I'd ever heard her sound shocked. I didn't look to see what had happened to Baraka; I just seized the opportunity to sit up, draw one of my daggers, and throw it at her. The ploy almost worked. Her sai scarcely deflected the dagger before it could pierce her lung, and its edge opened a gash in her side. She turned her gaze back to me, and it was so full of hatred that I knew the time for talk and games was over - she cared solely about killing me, now.

I was only up to one knee when she ran toward me and sprang. She flew through the air gracefully, effortlessly, reminding me of a day long lost, when I had tried to pull a prank on her in the Armory. That had been the last day we'd ever played as friends... the last day we'd ever been friends, really. Sometimes, I ruefully wonder whether my childhood antic triggered her malevolence. Or had that day simply been the first time I noticed or experienced her cruelty?

The dragon snapped its jaws shut on empty air, Kintaro-Tsung's fist crashed into the antechamber's wall, and I activated the magic bracelet hidden on my left wrist.

I soared like a wyvern.

The wristlet's power encased me, propelling me skyward faster and higher than Mileena could prepare for. She had no time to react before I gained a position above her and punched her in the jaw. She screeched and fell, flopping awkwardly on the ground below. I touched down lightly, next to her.

"Uh, 'sister,' can we finish this later?" she groaned.

"Why?"

She pointed behind me. Not daring to take my eyes completely off her, I turned just enough to glimpse the end of the internecine struggle between the dragon and Kintaro-Tsung. The dragon, its teeth locked tightly upon one of Kintaro-Tsung's arms, whipped the transformed sorcerer back and forth into the antechamber's corner walls, like a dog worrying its kill, and slammed him on the floor. The series of impacts was so forceful that the ground quaked, unbalancing both Mileena and me. Kintaro-Tsung's form shrank and blurred, resolving into the sorcerer's yellow-dressed, humanoid shape. Shang Tsung was still alive, but clearly disoriented. He tottered to his feet, reeling, on the verge of total collapse.

 **"BURN!"** commanded the dragon. Holocaust poured from its mouth.

Shang Tsung burned.

And not with ordinary, common flames that could be smothered or beaten out, but with all-consuming dragonfire. The white-hot conflagration licked at his body and turned his flesh translucent. A dying wail escaped his lips. His superheated blood expanded; its tremendous outward pressure ripped apart his body and bones. I drew my cloak around me for protection, and felt a few spattering stings of his charred remains even so.

 **"YOU TWO ARE NEXT."**

Master Kahn's laughter permeated the antechamber as the dragon pronounced its judgment upon Mileena and me. Mileena, as always, reacted first, jackknifing up and sprinting for the antechamber's exit to the hallway. She dived and rolled to escape one of the dragon's fiery blasts, then swore a foul oath when a half-dozen of the Master's guards refused to let her out, crossing their weapons in front of the closed doors. Mileena lifted her right knee and raised her glowing blue sai above her head, clearly preferring to force her way through the guards rather than face the dragon. But before she could cast her sorcery, the dragon's head darted down and its teeth crunched upon her left leg. The beast lifted her high, grinding its jaws while Mileena raved obscenities, then spat her back on the floor, her limb atrociously shattered above and below the knee. Shards of bone poked through the rents in her flesh.

 **"WILL DEVOUR YOU LATER,"** growled the dragon to Mileena. It fixed its vivid yellow eyes on me. **"MUST DEAL WITH YOU FIRST."**

"I am not Shang Tsung's minion," I told it, trying to keep my voice from quivering. "Haven't you realized that by now?"

 **"KUNG LAO IS DEAD BECAUSE _YOU_ BROUGHT HIM HERE!"**

There were no grounds for further discussion. I was ready to use my last sleeping-sap dart, but the dragon had learned from our previous encounter. It kept its jaws tightly shut as it approached within the dart's range. The dart wouldn't penetrate its scaled body. Its eyes were an extremely small target, and for all I knew its eyelids might be as armored as the rest of it. I didn't have enough time to get out of the corner before the dragon loomed in front of me.

The beast reared on its hind legs. I raised my arms and activated the magic bracelet hidden on my right wrist.

The dragon started to pounce down upon me, yet something slowed and stopped it. Faint, pink traces of mystical energy rippled through the air. I had to step far back with my right leg to fully support myself against the wristlet's recoil. Whatever force the item produced paralyzed the dragon and lifted it off its feet, slowly carrying it backward and upward. It thrashed, gnashing its teeth and wriggling like a water moccasin, but it could not break the sorcery's mysterious pull. Its jaws parted and it sprayed fire back and forth to either side, unable to point its head down and breathe fire directly upon me. That was my cue. Just as its flames died down, I used the power of my left wristlet to soar into the air, and threw my final sleeping-sap dart into its open mouth. The sorcery that had held it suspended vanished; it flopped listlessly on the marble floor, very close to where Mileena lay.

 **"NOT... AGAIN...!"** It floundered, fighting the dart's effects, then went limp and metamorphosed back into Liu Kang. I approached, bowing my head and casting my eyes down. The antechamber's white marble floor was haphazardly littered with charred bones, ashes, and smears of carnage.

The chaos had ended, and I was the last one standing. I had won. I had successfully completed Master Kahn's mission, despite all obstacles. Yet I felt as bad as if I'd failed. Clutching my bleeding arm and enduring the painful throbbing in my back and collarbone, I gazed down upon the comatose Liu Kang. My heart felt no victory, no joy, and no pride; only a deep ache of sadness and hurt.

 **"EXCELLENT! WELL DONE,"** rumbled the Master, approvingly. I did not have to turn and look to know that he stood in the archway between the antechamber and his throne room. After all, he'd been watching the entire goddamn spectacle. **"YOU HAVE DEFEATED THE DRAGON IN BATTLE. NOW, FINISH IT OFF!"**

I let my bladed fan slide into my right hand.

 _Promise that you'll expunge this dire threat to the Kahn._

 _~What type of 'Master' gives such orders, and what type of servant carries them out?~_

 _I sincerely hope you haven't killed him._

 _You know what your problem is? You care too much._

"Damn you, Kitana, what are you waiting for!?" shrilled Mileena, propping herself up with her hands. "The thing wanted to _eat_ us! Kill it! _Now_! KILL IT NOW!"

"Yes," I assented, slashing downward with my fan.

Its edge sliced through Mileena's neck, cleanly decapitating her before an expression of shock could register upon her brows and eyes. Her severed head bounced to a stop a couple feet away, face up. I kneeled next to it and indelicately pulled off her mask. A monstrous, mutant-like visage grinned back at me. Though Mileena's eyes were like those of a normal human, her lower face and jaw were grotesquely distorted. Her mouth was permanently frozen into an inhumanly wide rictus smile, with a mouthful of long, pointed metal teeth.

She was not my twin sister. She never had been. How many of the other things I'd learned in the course of my journey were true? How many of the convictions I'd clung to all my life were lies? If Kung Lao had been right about her all along...

Kung Lao!

I dashed to where I'd last seen him. I knew he must be dead, no mortal could endure the punishment he had and survive, but I had to be sure. Soon, I saw what had made Baraka cry out, earlier. Kung Lao had brought the edge of his hat down upon Baraka's head, splitting the mutant's skull and brain in half. The hat remained lodged in Baraka's neck, just above the voicebox. Kung Lao's right hand tightly clutched his gore-drenched headgear.

He was still alive.

He leaned against the antechamber's wall with his eyes closed. The dead mutant's blades ran through him. Bright red blood pooled across his uniform, so thickly as to obscure the scarlet character; Baraka must have cut open an artery. A few pieces of his flesh had been torn out, almost enough to reveal his mangled internal organs. His pulse was extremely rapid, and his skin felt cold and clammy to the touch.

I sheared off a strip of my cloak and used the fabric to apply direct pressure to his wounds. I didn't try to remove the blades in Kung Lao's chest; that would only have accelerated his blood loss. It wasn't as if I really knew what I was doing, though. My area of expertise is killing people, not saving them.

"...Liu Kang...?" he aspirated, so feebly I almost didn't hear.

"He's just sleeping off another dart, that's all. He'll be fine. Don't try to talk any more, all right?" I cut more strips off my cloak and piled them on the disorganized dressing, which was gradually becoming soaked.

"...wasting... your time..."

"I told you to be quiet, damn you!"

"...bet... you say that... to all the guys." His left hand reached for mine, and fell short.

Shao Kahn started laughing. Again.

The last of Kung Lao's lifeblood left fresh stains upon my gloved hands. I sluggishly turned away from his remains. The air seemed to have thickened into a viscous mucus, which yielded slowly before my efforts. With a monumental exertion, I stood up, and blankly looked at the mocking despot.

Understanding blossomed.

I'd thought I'd understood before, the day the Kahn had charged me with my mission, but in reality I'd only seen a tiny facet of the whole truth. This time I knew. I knew everything.

"It's not just Shang Tsung, is it? We are all your pet clowns. All of us.

"You've been using your powers to watch over my quest the whole time, haven't you? You've even condoned a bookmaking operation on my progress. And when I won past the hazards outside Shokan, you gave the sorcerer and his allies permission to waylay us in your antechamber. You knew that Kung Lao and I wouldn't surrender Liu Kang to them without a fight. And what a fight it was - all for your amusement.

"You don't need a Tournament to eliminate your enemies or gain access to the Mother Realm, do you? Or perhaps you do, but that isn't your primary motive for holding it. The greatest single reason why you're sponsoring the contest... why you're going to such lengths to recruit the strongest mortal participants you can find... is because you want a good show."

I accusingly pointed my sanguinary index finger at him. "Everything - the blood, the death, the suffering - it's all exclusively for your _entertainment_!"

 **"YOU DID NOT KNOW?"**

I contemplated ways to kill him.

I longed to slice his head off with my fan. I wanted to see his metal mask crumpled, broken, rocking on the ground. I yearned to snap his imperial spear into splintered pieces. Yet no matter what I might try, it probably wouldn't work. If I were to rush him, he could thrust with his spear and skewer me before I got close enough. My darts would have been useless, even if I had any left; the power concentrated within his body eradicates toxins from his system, rendering him immune to most if not all poisons. Throwing a dagger might work, but I couldn't count upon it killing him, even if it hit. More likely, it would just wound him and he would quickly heal himself. There was also the factor of at least a dozen guards in the immediate area. If I were to attack Shao Kahn in any way, even with my magic bracelets, then I would not leave this room alive. Nor would I be brought back from the dead. If I succeeded, the Kahn would not be able to resurrect me; if I failed, he would not want to.

None of that seemed very important, though.

 _Don't you care about your own life?_

 _Does it matter? Yes, I care. When has that ever made a difference?_

I set aside my dreams of murdering the Kahn; they wouldn't do any good, not at this time or place. No, my most practical course of action would be to...

Would be to...

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. "O 'Master' Shao Kahn, your humble vassal has served you faithfully. Against overwhelming odds, I have delivered to you the warrior Liu Kang, alive and unhurt, as you asked. And I have... entertained you greatly in the process."

 **"THAT IS TRUE. YOU HAVE."**

I sank to my knees and kowtowed, touching my forehead to the marble floor. Without moving from my position of self-abasement, I said, "'Master,' I implore of you - grant your loyal servant a boon."

* * *

Kung Lao's eyes snapped open. "What the-?"

"Don't try to sit up just yet," I counselled. "A certain amount of disorientation is to be expected. It will pass in a few minutes."

He ignored my advice and awkwardly struggled part-way up, bracing himself on his forearms and elbows. "I remember... pain. Lots of pain. Then..." He closed his eyes and concentrated for a moment. "...nothing?"

"You once wondered what it is like to return from the grey kingdom. Now you know."

"But I don't remember anything."

"That is what it is like."

He eased into a sitting position, started to put his head in his hands, then realized that his right hand still clutched his hat. Putting the article back on, he glanced down at himself and looked surprised. "My vest! It was stained and nearly shredded; now it's whole again?"

"So, do you find the repair of your livery more amazing than the healing of your body?"

"Hm. Not when you put it that way, I guess." He sighed and aligned the hat's brim perfectly level. "I don't suppose you want to tell me what the hell happened..."

"Shao Kahn has resurrected Shang Tsung, Baraka, and Mileena, because he wants them to participate in his Tournament. He said that without them, it wouldn't be as - _entertaining_." The last word left a foul taste in my mouth. "What is it?" I asked, when I saw Kung Lao's eyebrows go up a little.

"Do you know, that's the first time I've ever heard you call him just 'Shao Kahn'? It always used to be 'Master' this, or 'Master' that."

I shrugged. "Liu Kang will also be in the Tournament, when he awakens. I've petitioned to enter it as well. You, too, are slated to take part. Officially, that is why the Kahn revivified you. He has seen you fight, and he is convinced that you'll be a worthy contestant. You're pretty lucky; he's been doing a great deal of resurrection, lately. It has been a serious drain upon his energy reserves. He won't be able to keep it up for much longer."

"And unofficially?"

"What?"

"You said, 'Officially,' etc. What was the unofficial reason for my revival?"

I resolved to be more wary in the future; a verbal slip like that could be perilous in the wrong company. "Unofficially, I requested it."

He pushed the front part of his hat up a couple more inches and displayed his charming smile. "I didn't know you cared."

"Don't get any impressions," I admonished. "I made the entreaty solely because I owed you a lifedebt."

Kung Lao did not contradict my assertion. He knew that I was lying, and I knew that I was lying, so what purpose would there have been in disputing the matter?

* * *

Shao Kahn has put forth some new rules for his Tournament, in order to make it "fair." He has forbidden Liu Kang and Shang Tsung to shape-shift into anything save the forms of the other human-sized participants, at least during the heat of battle. He has also forbidden me to use my poisoned darts. That is all right. I don't need my darts to take back what is mine. I have better weapons. Underneath my gloves, I carry and control a force powerful enough to subdue a dragon - which means that it can also vanquish General Kintaro and the Kahn.

I will have to do battle against some or all of the other entrants, and win, before I earn the right to challenge Shao Kahn. Perhaps I may have to face off against Liu Kang, Kung Lao, or other warriors of the light. If so, then there can be no holding back. Should Kintaro or Shao Kahn suspect that I am not fighting in earnest, they will disqualify me, and I'll never have the chance to bring them down once and for all.

Jade, I want you to read these pages, so that you'll know what your sister is like - or was like, depending on how the Tournament progresses. I will attempt everything in my power to overthrow the Kahn, clear our parents' names, and speed the healing of the land. It is what I must do to make amends for my crimes.

The Outworld was once a realm of beauty. It is not too late to restore these lands to their former splendor. Only then can I begin to atone for the blood on my hands.

 **end part two of two**

* * *

 ** **Disclaimer: I am not Victar! I am merely crossposting his stories onto this site after obtaining his permission. With Victar's site being closed with the rest of AOL, I am posting his Mortal Kombat stories to FFnet to archive them. This story was written by him, and all credit goes to him.****


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